“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.
Much
like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show,
in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television
show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political
scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully
calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and
control a population.
Take the media circus that is the Donald
Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite
for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted,
diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As
long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always
polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s
seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or
government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies
suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that
it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it
becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully
crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On
average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the
time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a
week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV
programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers
every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a
citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order
to think critically about the issues of the day.
Yet look
behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand
distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama
that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the
madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated,
carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to
control a population and advance a political agenda without much
opposition from the citizenry.
This is how you persuade a
populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police
themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted
out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to
distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda
campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government....<<<
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