Everything Reflects Poorly In The Fun-house, Plus

All the press have lost their goddamn minds, plus

The pros turn weird (credit Weldon Berger)

Everything Reflects Poorly In The Fun-house

Mirror mazes and fun-house mirrors show up in movies a lot in part because they’re a cheap jump-scare, and in part because they’re such a good shorthand for the malleable nature of reality; you’re wanted not to trust what you see; everything is distorted; tension is amplified; and it works because everyone, even the person who seems to have a rock-solid sense of reality, has moments where everything feels unreal.

(Yr. faithful correspondent has had entire decades, including the current one, consisting of little but moments like that.)

There’s obviously a degree of unreality heralded by the actual fact that a teenager called Edward Big Balls (link courtesy Wired Magazine, which is selling a year’s subscription for less than the cost of a dozen eggs) is at present near the top of the decision tree in numerous federal agencies.

This is happening but it can’t be but it is, and in fact it’s only an unusually overt and extreme manifestation of something that happens all the time in presidential administrations: the selection of political and bureaucratic appointees by moneyed interests with ideological and financial axes—to whatever extent those can be distinguished—to grind.

For example, and by way of demonstrating that this is not purely a feature of The Enemy’s administrations, in 2008 Michael Froman, then a senior Citigroup executive and later Obama’s trade representative, supplied Obama transition co-manager and future Clinton campaign chair John Podesta with an uncannily prescient list of nominees to top administration posts.

These included attorney general Eric Holder and treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, two key figures in cushioning finance industry corporations and executives from the worst consequences of their own culpability in the financial collapse of 2008-2009, a choice that necessarily involved sacrificing the interests of people at the bottom of the heap.

That was Money choosing Money to go to Washington and protect Money. The major differences were that none of the appointees and hirees went by Big Balls, none of them were teenagers in anything but temperament, and they were all broadly acceptable to opinion leaders in politics and the institutional press, although that didn’t keep our reactionary elements from calling them commies, by which is still meant, 70 years on, anybody to the left of John Birch society founder Robert Welch.

So it’s not unusual, in fact it’s routine, to have immensely wealthy people and organizations corrupting what we like to call the democratic process. Hardly anybody who voted for Obama wanted Holder and Geithner to save the banksters from prosecution and financial ruin at the expense of the voters, but that’s what happened.

I’ve mentioned before some studies suggesting that our political system has long been more an oligarchy with democratic characteristics than an actual democratic republic.

This state of affairs has not been accurately reflected in the textbooks and news stories we’re raised on. Not that we have civics textbooks these days, but if we did you wouldn’t read about research which concludes that “when the affluent prefer policy change and the middle oppose it, the rate of change is nearly identical to when both groups prefer it. When only the middle prefer policy change, the rate of change is the same as when both groups oppose it.”

You get to college and you start seeing courses and texts and professors reflecting that kind of thought, which is why reactionaries have been so hell-bent for so long on targeting colleges and non-reactionary professors and students—aided recently by the too often liberal-approved crackdown on pro-Palestinian student and faculty protesters, among whom there’s a lot of anti-capitalist sentiment—and why, for instance, the MBA has become the most popular degree among both students and administrators at lots of schools. Money should control everything, and I should have money.

The point being that we’re living in the funhouse and we’re constantly being told we’re not, which can obscure where we are even to the most determinedly hard-headed observer. What’s changed with this most recent election is not the underlying reality, but that Elon and Chucky the Homicidal Dummy have smashed the mirrors.

All the press have lost their goddamn minds

Amid all this smashing of mirrors, the press are too often doing their best to wish them back together. One of the most glaring examples of the mirror-restoration industry is Chucky’s proposal for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which would constitute an additional crime against humanity atop all the other ones committed there.

I’ve mentioned The New York Times several in that regard; they’ve gone rapidly from, paraphrasing, “this is unworkable and illegal” (in that order) to “this is certainly out there but hey, it could work or lead to something better.” The “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity” components are no longer editorially relevant, it seems.

Now the Associated Press and CNN have joined the fun, both of them in stories covering Chucky’s announcement that Palestinians would have no right of return after being ethnically cleansed from Gaza. Neither effort features so much as the word “illegal,” which all of this stuff very much is, hence the “crime against humanity” designation by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

(I’ve emailed the reporters on the AP story asking why they elided the international law component of the scenario; I don’t expect to hear back but will report if they respond.)

More broadly we find the press chasing cracks in the mirror, trying to reframe the executive seizing power from Congress and dismissing the authority of courts as something other than a coup. They’re still living in a state of suspended disbelief and they would like all of us to rejoin them there.

Not really what we need.

Subscribe!

If you like this stuff, let me know, share it around and consider a free or paid subscription—you get the same thing from both except the satisfaction of keeping me in bananas when you pay.

Some Fine Feckin Music

Wolf Alice, Blue Weekend, “Smile;”

LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening, “Drunk Girls” live;

Big Joanie, Back Home, “What Are You Waiting For” live on KEXP;

Pokey Lafarge, In the Blossom of Their Shade, “Fine to Me”

La Luz, News of the Universe, live on KEXP

Take care; be well.