Reality hardly matters in all this. Remember the run on guns when Obama was elected? Expect another, not because he’s ever banned any guns, or ever said he will, or could.
health care, the rights of women, the urgent need to create a working immigration system, the role of government in aiding the old and the sick and the impoverished, the importance of the rich to contribute their fair share — it’s ridiculous to enter the scrum, pretending to be neutral, as if I just showed up and happened to notice the latest gaffe of Mitt Romney’s —
and argued that it somehow tipped the balance.
That’s an illusion, though one the media traffics in. The false balance, particularly now that the Democrats seem to have taken a page from the Republican playbook and are running the Just Say Anything blitz — last week, vice president Joe Biden, one of the more affable goofs to hold an office that has seen its share, stood in front of a largely black audience and said, of Republicans, “They are going to put y’all back in chains.”
Imbecile. And I’ll tell you why. It isn’t just that the Republicans will not, in fact, bring back slavery — perhaps embrace a dominance of corporate interests that will like a kind of slavery to the non-rich. Nor just because even to invoke the atrocity in that setting is simple- minded and offensive.
But to me, to lash out in such a crude style lets Republicans slip off the hook for the crazy stuff they sincerely plan on doing. Mere days after Wisconsin Tea Party darling Paul Ryan was named as Romney’s running mate, Biden, if he had sense, should be dryly reading Ryan’s past speeches about gutting Medicare, with an occasional sigh, not making up threats and slipping into accents.
In contrast, Romney’s recent excess was nowhere near as crude. “Take your campaign of division and anger back to Chicago” he ordered Obama. Really? As much as the past years have been spent listening to a blast of fictionalized hate hurled against Obama — a socialist, a terrorist, not an American — it can still be surprising to grasp how some Republicans view him. That the intellectual, naive Obama, who messed up by pulling out a an acoustic guitar and expecting the Republicans to sing “Kumbaya” with him, can be accused with a straight face of “division and hate,” even by as notorious a liar as Mitt Romney, is just is hard to understand. It must have focus-group tested well, which would explain why “back to Chicago” is there. We’ve become the nation’s Fear City, what New York was in the mid1970s. Next he’ll be saying, go “back to Chicago, to your friends Emma Goldman and Al Capone.”
Reality hardly matters in all this. Remember the run on guns when Obama was elected? Expect another, not because he’s ever banned any guns, or ever said he will, or could. Rather gun control is one of the claws hanging off the evil, bogeyman, straw Obama that Republicans conjure to scare each other.
So back to pie. Corporations can’t make good pie for the same reason presidential elections can’t be rational. Because they’re not trying to do that. That’s not their goal. The goal is to sell the most stuff to the most people, and most people are happy with a mediocre pie-like comestible. Ditto for politics. Crude attack is what the groundlings howl for. It’s Banquet frozen pie — a barely acceptable facsimile of debate packaged to resemble the real-thing so as to gull the easily satisfied. Real pie takes real thought, real time, real effort, created by those who care for those few who expect something better.