Between inning gibberish and the Wilder brigade
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I've spent the last month here ignoring current events and writing exclusively about music, and I feel like it's done my soul a world of good. When the evenings come and I settle in to watch the MLB playoffs I'm bombarded with back to back to back to back political ads that have the subtlety of a 2x4 across the skull. Between every inning of every game I hear the following...
If you vote for Fetterman we're all gonna die
If you vote for Oz we're all gonna die
If you vote for Bognet we're all gonna die
If you vote for Cartwright we're all gonna die
...each in 30 second sound-bytes featuring a cacophony of half-truths cut with blatant lies and enough out of context quotes to confuse anybody with an IQ below 80, which seems to cover the demographic that sways elections these days. And I swear they all use the same voice-over actors and actresses, which makes it even more disconcerting. There isn't a spark of originality or wit in ANY of the ads, unless you count the truly bizarre Bognet ad that features the candidate's father reminiscing about paying his son slave wages as a boy and threatening to hit him over the head with a shovel when he didn't want to get up for work. If that's not an unintentional endorsement of unionism I don't know what is. Anyway..... every promise made in these ads is ludicrous, even if it's worthwhile. Fetterman is going to make weed legal. How exactly is one guy gonna do that? He doesn't say. To be fair, Oz doesn't say how he's going to stop crime (go big or go home I guess) or "secure the border" either, which would be a neat trick from 1000 miles away. None of these guys seems very detail oriented.
It's like a waterfall of partisan gibberish. If you've come this far on my page you know where I fall on the political spectrum....so I won't bore you with the particulars of why I think Oz and Bognet are misogynistic, bootlicking twits, both as dumb as a box of hammers. My heart is just not in it right now.
I mean, it could be worse. Compared to a lot of Republicans, Oz and Bognet are what passes for middle of the road. And smart. I can't imagine sitting through a barrage of between-inning Lauren Boebert of Marjorie Taylor Greene ads. It might ruin baseball for me, forever. Boebert is preparing her supporters for the second coming of Jesus, which since she’s still campaigning and soliciting donations presumably won’t be until after the election. So mark that down if you believe yourself to be rapture-worthy.
Greene, Boebert’s intellectual doppelganger, was busy this week "honoring the confederate soldiers of the Wilder brigade" on the Chickamauga Civil War battlefield in her home state. She posted pics of herself there, pledging to always "defend our nation's history", but later had to remove the post when it was pointed out to her that "Wilder's Brigade" was actually part of the Federal army. Oops.
This type of stupidity is almost sublime. Far too often we look for deep explanations as to why things are the way they are. The truth is, there are simply way too many evil dumb fucks out there.
Seeing this stuff is bad enough. Writing about it, which I've done a fair amount of in the past, is like going for a walk carrying a back-pack filled with bricks. To write about something is to become immersed in it, and I'd much prefer writing about the genius of The Band than about why people are still filled with enough dumb-fuckery to give money to Alex Jones.
Even when I get good news, like Steve Bannon getting sentenced to 4 months in prison for contempt of Congress, it gets tempered with "but he's free pending appeal", the basis of which I do not grasp. What exactly is he appealing? That he lost? He ignored a fucking congressional subpoena. Lock his unwashed fat ass up. Why do there never seem to be ANY consequences for these clowns? Trump himself was just subpoenaed by the 1/6 committee today, something he'll surely ignore, much to the chagrin of a nation that would be absolutely riveted by him being asked, under oath, about his inauguration crowd size and his careful studies of windmill cancers and forest raking. They could put this on pay per view and make enough money to buy China.
See what I mean? Even just a few sentences and the bitterness creeps in, and I'm carried along the stupid highway as if being pulled by a tow-truck. I’m pounding the keys extra hard, and have to keep getting up and walking outside to avoid turning into that fat private from Full Metal Jacket who lost his shit after being whacked too many times with pillow cases filled with soap.
This is why I turned to music for a month. And that is why I'll probably be turning towards it even more going forward on these pages. Music never fills me with contempt.
Drop me a note. I’d love to hear from you.
In a bit...
--tf