The 13th Clown has been in a treatment facility for the past several months trying to kick a nasty Cheetos habit. It hasn’t been altogether successful although his cravings have been shifted to the less processed standard potato chip. While these greasy little thin slices of potato are calorie and salt laden, they apparently do less internal damage than the mystery-goop-filled Cheeto. And chips don’t turn your fingers orange. So there’s that.
The Clown has received many, well several, OK, a couple of queries from readers about the long dry spell. His incarcerat…voluntary treatment routine dampened the creative juices which had largely been fueled by Cheetos and bourbon. The treatment facility allows neither.
While in treatment, it became clear to the Clown that a number of rank amateurs had flooded the American political system with outrageous clown behavior, making it nearly impossible to make up stuff that is more bonkers and occasionally funny than what might be sparked in a professional clown’s tangled brain synapses.
If it weren’t for the fact that these amateur clowns pose a threat to the survival of the American experiment in self rule, we could all just buy extra popcorn, pour a tall glass of sweet tea or Michelob Ultra and enjoy the clown show.
However, the situation is actually dire.
Currently, the House republican caucus is as riotous as the Keystone Cops but not at all funny, given that the world, depending mightily on American leadership, is bursting out with wars, continuing instances of war crimes and the threat of a wider theater of conflict spreading across the Middle East. Of course this area of the world has always been a flash point due to huge supplies of oil, a blood and soil “religion of peace” that prefers infidels beheaded, even in bassinets, and a history of colonization by the “civilized” western powers. Mix the Jewish people, who unwisely elect a dishonest snake like Bibi, with the 11th century mindset of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or Isis and the chances of friendly accommodations over land and human rights is vanishingly small.
Back to the non-functioning American political problem. The amateur clowns of the American political system have a simple genesis. It’s the voters, stupid! And, it’s the stupid voters. For every single clown, such as crotch-grabbing Lauren Boebert, MTG, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy and the entirety of the “Freedom Caucus”, the voters in their districts voted for them. That’s who they want. They want clowns.
Well, why would this be, the Clown asks rhetorically? He does so because, like any rhetorical question, the asker knows the answer.
America has been definitively split into three groups of voters. The informed, the blithely ignorant and the misinformed. This last group is in thrall to the very profitable disinformation industry. This group represents tens of millions of MAGA faithful. Some of these voters believe that Trump and the newly conceived Space Force are secretly working together to return Trump to power and then hold military tribunals to make the treasonous democrats and various other turncoats (whoever has turned on DJT, like General Mark Milley), face the music. The Clown cannot imagine coming up with a clown routine brimming with such creative and resoundingly foolish content. These people vote and what they want in a representative is what the disinformation industry tells them to want.
It’s taken 30+ years of Rush, Murdoch, Hannity, et al to create this alternative universe of “news and information”. It has also convinced these voters that the legacy media have always been liars that secretly support the worldwide cabal of Jewish bankers, Space Laser manufacturers, baby-blood drinking satanists and pedophiles.
The Clown doubts strongly that the drafters of the Constitution intended the First Amendment as an eventual poison pill for the Republic. They simply could not have imagined a fourth estate and Internet that would be so intent on sowing division that the health of the Republic would be threatened. Many have argued that lies and character assassinations have been part of the political media since its inception. The Jefferson v. Adams campaigns is a cogent example. True, but consider the reality of those years. News and information were distributed via newsprint and handbills. The distribution areas were small, the spread of disinformation was slow and countered by other disinformation. Now, there is information, disinformation and Internet bile everywhere, all at once, all the forking time.
Recall, then, the early and mid-20th century. The American media landscape was drastically different than in 1800. Radio, local newspapers, magazines and then television dominated. Up until Rush took advantage of the abrogation of the Fairness Doctrine (birthed by the republicans because the “media was too left-wing” and then killed by the republicans because the result of the Doctrine failed to work in their favor) Americans got their news and information from the same sources. Prior to 1989, American drank from the same information fountains. It was never perfect but it was consistent.
America’s disinformation industry has a 20th century corollary, Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine. Goebbels, a mediocre PR flack, had only to convince 30% of Germans that all of their problems, and they had a bunch, were because of the Jews and that Hitler was “the only one who could fix it”. Sound familiar? So, with a large but minority support, Adolph gains power legally. Nearly unimaginable tragedy follows.
Following WW II, the Germans vowed to never let unrestricted free speech destroy the country again. It is now a thriving democracy with strict limits on hate speech and lies. Yet, varying opinions and serious clashes of policy are tolerated but the kind of poison we Americans allow to spread across the country would not be tolerated there. And Germany is not the only democracy in Europe that squelches speech consisting of outright fabrication, character assassinations of peoples or individuals or conspiracy theories that do all three.
If America doesn’t put on its Big Boy Pants and summon the courage to re-think what Free Speech actually means in a world connected with virtually instantaneous “news and information”, much of it from unreliable sources, some with evil intent (see Myanmar Rohingya slaughter prompted by Facebook posts), he fears the American experiment in self rule is doomed. He leaves you with a quote from James Madison (apparently he was a big pooh-bah at the Constitutional convention and later, I’m told, became president), “A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate.“
Observoid of the Day: The same people who push back on regulating untrue Internet posts as a “suppression of free speech” are the same people who want Tony Morrison’s books removed from school libraries. This is an incredibly odious pile of hypocrisy.