Procrastinet

The Reality-Based Community

filed under: Hey, What's The Big Idea

What's been most amazing and frustrating about amateur political blogging is watching the constant interplay between reality and reality-as-received-by-the-public. Because never the twain shall meet.

I'm not even going to post links to supporting materials here, so this is less blogging and more ranting and/or cleaning house in the muddled confines of my brain.

Here are some things that are true: the administration used 9/11 as an excuse to wage a war of choice which has been a pet idea of the neoconservative movement for a long time. WMDs were the most publicly palatable rationalization, and the easiest scare tactic. We are a nation massively in debt with no sign of improvement but instead a steepening slope. We are not safe from terrorism, and the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack, while still probably pretty long, are better than they were three years ago.

The guiding principle of the current administration is as simple as this: weaken or eliminate the government's ability to cost Businesses money in any way or for any purpose; when possible, create new opportunities for Businesses to profit. This is done not purely out of greed, but out of a soul-deep belief that this represents the Dream of America properly realized.

There is a concerted, national effort afoot to pervert the electoral process by suppressing voter turnout, jerrymandering congressional districts, keeping democratic/minority/urban voters off the rolls and away from the polls, and possibly outright fraud with an insecure, unverifiable electronic ballot (see: Deibold) and rabid partisans holding the reins of oversight in key states (see: Florida).

The news media is an entertainment industry.

The vast majority of the country (myself sporadically included) lives in a mass media created bubble which bears little or no resemblence to reality as it is actually lived and experienced. The force of psychological inertia is so massive that it took an event like 9/11 to get the vast complacent horde to briefly reconsidering the paradigm, only to relapse into semi-catatonia (myself included).

Electoral politics has become indistinguishable from mass marketing.

We are used to believing that history is something that happened, not something that's happening. McCarthyism, fascism, massive political upheaval, the perversion of entire systems of governance - all things that once happened and that we now safely reflect on. Meanwhile, history of a kind that will be discussed for the remainder of the life of America is happening all around us.

The race for the Presidency remains too close to call.

All of these things are true.

None of the above is written from a position of despair. I'm just trying to catalog and sort and process. And since I'm trying to get a glimpse of a larger, vital reality but I'm doing it 99% through the screen of a computer, I've got some wicked cognitive dissonance going on.

Thanks for listening.

Posted by rjt at October 18, 2004 12:34 PM