Escape from Oz

Like everyone, I’m too exhausted to post here as often as I should, even to merely fulfill my own selfish mandate, which only means, in effect, that the Bannon strategy – y’know, flooding with shit etc. – is in fact a masterfully effective and successful power-grab maneuver. Realizing this of course should only make us angrier – seeing clearly that it’s all just bugle blasts and bullshit, no substance, and that the American media is so hapless and naive that it can’t help but engage with this flow of lava farts just the way That Asswipe wants them to. That is, as if his ten-times-a-day outrages and crimes and idiotic pronouncements are actually the decipherable acts and rhetoric of a real politician, meant for explication and “analysis.” Fucking kidding me? But you read the Times and listen to NPR, and there they go, “analyzing” and chatting as if this is all real geopolitical action, with a real ideology behind it.

It’s not, none of it – from Greenland to murdering Venezuelan fishermen to sending ICE randomly into blue cities to defunding cancer research to shitposting about late-night talk shows, you name it. None of it is “real,” in the Baudrillardian sense, however real some of it might be. It’s all actually just droplets of agitprop manipulation, poured into the flood, intended to do only one thing: keep us distracted and fuming, day in, day out. Which in turn keeps the fucking almighty “base” – the 12% of Americans too shit-headed to fathom, even by now, that they’re being grifted and robbed and made into shock-troop puppets – revved with social media dopamine. Their delight is based entirely upon our misery, and they will shit in their beds before they admit they’ve been had. That’s all that’s going on: it’s a show, a show that kills people and thieves from the public till and ruins decades of infrastructure, and we’re the audience. A show, performed. It could all be virtual, for as much as it matters. Whether you’re a hater or a fan (current estimates put that ratio at something like 10 to 1, conservatively), the ratings are so through the roof you can’t stop it, you can’t deprive it of oxygen, you can’t pull the plug. If attention could be Hoovered up by claiming to have conquered Mars, then that would happen. If you’re going to analyze anything, you shoulder consider how the confederacy of goblins and whores running the federal government are planning on keeping this show on the air.

(Which is is a fascinating way to think about this whole fetid wedge of American history – realizing, simply, that without the Internet, social media, 24-hour TV news and podcasts (which is radio, c’mon), all of them scrims of simulation and performance that are essentially free to access and are not only ubiquitous but unavoidable, then the Asswipe Era would not have even happened. No shot. Without its 21st-century distraction-culture platforms, it wouldn’t have seen daylight. Something else would’ve happened, something slower, more mitigated by reality. The “base” isn’t motivated by economic grievances or bigotry or anything else – they’re motivated by ephemeral entertainment, on their phones. That may be all there is to it. Think about that next time you’re weighing how new tech compensates us for its aggravations and invasions and drive-us-crazy complexities with “convenience.”)

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone in a position of media power decided to see this fake Wizard of Oz display for what it is, and framed it that way, every day – as a form of empty public theater, the Flood of Shit in the Zone, which would mandate the pertinent questions: what’s really happening? What’s outside the Zone of our little screens? What would happen if we decided that we knew it was all Shit? Because we actually all do. Consider that “base” again – if their attention calories are derived exclusively from their schadenfreude, that means, simply, they know it’s Zone Shit, too. They like it, but they’re still aware of what it really is. Which is nothing. So, if 100% of us are wide-awake to the Shit Show, is this the 21st-century America we're destined to have?