Biden dieing of fucking Covid after this big show would be historically beautiful. Let's all pray
One last muffled "listen here jack :biden-troll:" through his oxygen mask before flat lining.
The dying words as his snow globe falls to the floor and shatters:
"...corn pop..."
If I can't have my dream job, I'd settle for being the bloke whose job it is to hit the cymbal any time there's a scene transition in a reality TV show and/or in Eldin Ring
I used to think American democracy was a tragedy, but now I know it's a comedy. :joker-troll:
Technically Arthur was right; the old Greek definition of a comedy is any story where the main character achieves their goal. Arthur wanted revenge and respect, and he got it. It wasn't the right choice and he made everything around him worse, but he got what he wanted.
Arthur is exactly what failing to read theory does to a motherfucker.
And having the President do scripted stand-up comedy is a great way to convince everyone of that!
“I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have,” Biden said.
:dean-frown:
once the news started airing twitter posts from randoms as part of their regular media coverage, it became a reality show
I alway looked at that as the result of a progression of ever-lazier and inferior minds, which are now the criteria of MSM newsrooms, both basically scanning Twitter for the most re-tweeted bits as an acknowledgment that they’ll never have anything interesting to say about anything (and will cede to the masses). But in a more positive spin, I suppose - and this is something that I hope ultimately will get the most traction, it’s that they’re also bringing in views (Al Jazeera does a great job of often presenting illuminating points of view from their international viewers ) that give more credence to the long unacknowledged truth that the masses often have more sound and broader views that the paid punditry.
I mean, whenever most of these highly paid clowns on cable news (forget local news broadcasts which are just crammed with the most stilted of zombies) go off script or extemporize it’s clear they’re just a bunch of toady flunkies for the corporate state.
It helps to remember that the entire media space is designed to propagate commercial advertisements. Everything outside the airing of ads is a cost-center to be reduced. So the issue isn't of laziness or inferiority of intellect, its simply of cost-controls and budget cuts, as the media industry looks to get as wide a profit margin as possible.
we started to cross the hyperreal divide between "actual politics" and entertainment spectacle at least since the election of Reagan, who was the former Hollywood actor "playing" the role of president. Before Trump, we also had the mixed-media battle between VP Dan Quayle and fictional character Murphy Brown over family values in 1992, both of whom wrote the other into their respective scripts. And now that kind of shit happens daily on twitter. So to agree with everyone else, it's long been reality TV
Murphy Brown was the proto she-boss Karen. She destroyed Dan Quayle and Andrew Dice Clay. I mean, not really, but boy were there some great zingers in those episodes!
we started to cross the hyperreal divide between “actual politics” and entertainment spectacle at least since the election of Reagan
I was listening to WTYP Penn Station epsidoe, and they had a throw-away line about the NYTimes being established in reaction to the NYTribune corresponding with Marx. Media's been an entertainment spectacle pretty much since day one, as news you can't do anything about isn't engaging unless it is entertaining.
The real divide between news and politics stems from the chronic efforts by business, church, and state agents to break up and dissolve activist organizations. That's not something new. It goes straight back to Protestantism and the invention of the printing press. But the divide isn't in any way permanent, either. People are constantly attempting to organize and are routinely employing journalism as a tool to incite activism and galvanize support.
The modern manifestation of media, fact-checking, propagandizing, and censorship is ultimately a game of wack-a-mole as various fledgling movements attempt to emerge in the face of the establishment while the establishment hammers them back down into irrelevance.
yes, great points and observation. We could take the concept of spectacle all the way back to the origins of religion, tbh. From David Hawkes' book: "To take an image for true reality is the most heinous of all sins" in Islam, Christianity and Judaism (i.e., idolatry). I didn't mean to be ahistorical in my earlier comment, but rather chose a time during the television era because it was closer to the dawn of reality TV
It really has become one. CNN even treats it like one with the obnoxious editing they have for every debate during the primaries and general election.
