Reality show

By Capt. Fogg

Oh, who cares whether Ryan or Biden "won" this TV spectacle? Vice presidents don't count, unless you think about Cheney, and although Romney is a sock puppet with the strong arm of the radical authoritarians making his lips move, I don't see him being led around by Ryan as another Darth Cheney. Who cares anyway? It's not as though the public has become smarter or has learned from experience. These things are only a game and never, ever does a president resemble in office what he tried to resemble on camera and the platform they sell at the convention is rarely more than a facade.  There's a difference between dealing with the world as it is and dealing with the tableaux, the passion plays, the street theater, the Potemkin Village we take for reality.

So CNN says his supporters think Ryan expressed himself better. I don't know. I have better things to do with my time, but assuming he did, does anyone think that getting the angry rabble to cheer is the indicator of suitability to administrate a democracy -- even a pretend democracy like ours? Obama's haters were quick to syllogize at us in 2008 that he gave good speeches and Hitler gave good speeches, and therefore Obama is another Hitler. Who cares what such people think?

So the Romney-Ryan thing gives rousing speeches, albeit captious and dishonest ones. So the real truth is not quite as rousing, easily summed up to the satisfaction of one's enemies, or blamed on "libtards." Who gives a shit?

I had a conversation with someone last night. An engineer, a very nice guy, a very devout Baptist and fellow radio amateur about the peculiar state of the ionosphere. We're supposed to be near a sunspot peak and yet HF propagation is generally poor, without the summer openings on 10 and 6 meters we've waited years for. I joked about writing my congressman. He quipped about killing all the lawyers because, as he said, "they'll only blame it on global warming and George Bush." He wasn't smiling.

So easily is scientific consensus and massive data dismissed and so easily the destruction of the U.S. economy according to the 30-year experiment with trickle down, debt-doesn't-matter and wars-pay-for-themselves-when-we-cut-taxes agenda as given us by the Republicans. Truth doesn't matter, so how can these "debates" mean anything?

Really -- why should I listen to these things? I already know who has built a three-ring circus around  the argumentum ad captandum argument, learned to enrage the public with lies and profit from the rage they ignited. No, I'm not going to tell you that Romney will exterminate minorities or that Ryan is a Nazi who wants to put Grandma in a camp, but the people who pull their strings have perfected the same rhetoric, the technique and the ability to harness tribal enmity, bigotry, superstition, and self-pity.  They know how to make you passionately believe things that are self-contradictory, follow policies that always and dramatically fail and they know how to get their way. So sure, Romney won and Ryan won, or not, and whether or not they're elected, George W. Bush and global warming have sealed our fate, or at least made it unlikely that anything will ever be the same. 

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)