subject: Scandal, Entertainment, Politics And Elections [print this page] During an election year, this year being one, politics stops getting things done and starts becoming a big circus of daily entertainment. Some might argue that in fact politics is always that and they would be mostly correct. However, when elections roll around it becomes far more so. Scandal seems to haunt anyone bold enough to run for office. Celebrities and comedians chime in on a seemingly never ending array of topics that you would have heretofore never considered their province. The television is haunted by the over-sold faces not of Ashton Kutcher and Bradley Cooper(though they don't really go away either) but of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. We are swimming in politics as entertainment and it is probably terrible for both but it will not stop until November.
The need for constant attention necessitated by the perpetual motion machine of politics drives this slow motion disaster. It is the same sort of machine that moves star news through the culture like some sort of massive sausage manufacturing device that also imbibes and regurgitates those sausages over and over again. The whole thing might sound gross and cynical and guess what? It totally is! Time marches on and in the intervening "non-election" years there is some move towards getting things done but more and more it is seeming like there is always an election on the horizon and so there is always a reason to market scandal and celebrity over all actual public service.
Is there a way to fix all of this? Sadly probably not. Politics like entertainment is big business. It will always be way easier to kick the can down the road and keep the money flowing and the useless "news"/scandal machine fed. Are we actually complicit in this as so many people like to say? Are we the sheep allowing this whole thing to fly? Probably to some extents but any time a force has ever attempted to change things from inside or outside they are co-opted, corrupted or one way or another destroyed. Ultimately the whole system was built this way so that drastic irreversible change does not happen on out watch. When you start to think about it, it almost seems smart. It is as if some gigantic power larger than us, some collective zeitgeist has willed this all to happen. Like we are all feeding the beast with our spirit and some strange overwhelming power that is simply in the air. Or something like that, mostly I watch a lot of television.
