CSotD: Bond and Circuses
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It’s a pleasant fantasy, to imagine each bizarre, disturbing development coming along in a separate day. If it did, we could brace for it as Katauskas suggests. But, of course, that’s not how a firehose works, though the unbearable daily terror she posits would be an improvement on the flood that actually occurs.
As it is, then, the question that might help salvage our sanity is how much of this is genuinely threatening and how much is performative nonsense?
Benson assures us that everything is dandy, that the so-called “crisis” isn’t happening, and that we should not panic or pay any attention to the Democrats, but just stay where we are. Don’t move, and don’t panic! Don’t take off your shoes! Jobs is on the way!
However, not everybody is convinced that what they’re seeing is a fantasy. It seems very real and crisis-like, though, again, how much of it is serious and how much is offered as a silly distraction?
Invading Canada, despite how often as Dear Leader keeps flogging the notion, is obviously nonsense. One hopes.
Firing IRS personnel is real, as we’re about to find. It’s hard enough for taxpayers to get assistance on the phone, even with the agency’s seasonal hiring and the boosts in personnel it was granted under Biden. These cuts may make it hard to complete your taxes and will likely delay refunds, but it’s up to you to determine whether that’s a threat or just a hassle.
Juxtaposition of the Petty Nonsense
The plastic straws issue is clearly a cookie tossed to the mob to shut them up, and a childish “reform” that Dear Leader can do without having to be briefed on complex issues. Cartoonists have leapt upon it as a pleasant distraction from things that have to be taken seriously.
Silly as it is, Banx points out that it’s a step backwards in cleaning up the Earth, though it doesn’t rival Trump’s plans to kill off wind power and begin drilling in sensitive areas.
Koterba sees it as a distraction from Trump’s promises about grocery prices, though the sanewashing press is now microtoming those campaign promises to make sure we know that Dear Leader only kinda sorta maybe implied that he’d bring down prices, and that if you examine exactly what he said, well, that’s different.
Zyglis sees it as a shiny object, distracting Trump’s loyal fish from more substantive items and inducing them to forget the price of eggs and the assaults on the Constitution and just be glad not to have paper straws anymore.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Don’t panic over the FBI being turned over to a man who wants to destroy the FBI, because he doesn’t really have an enemies list. He just has a list of people disloyal to Dear Leader who should probably be investigated and re-educated.
Whether history repeats or rhymes, it seems familiar, because, as Conrad said, Nixon wanted audits of disloyal people back in 1973, and now we’ve got little muskrats crawling through the IRS files, harvesting personal information that they won’t ever, ever use in retribution, though Dear Leader did indeed say he was our retribution, and Kash Patel does indeed have a little list.
That seems familiar, too, as this 1973 Herblock cartoon suggests. If you’d like to see Nixon’s enemies list, it’s posted here, since, back in those days, even Nixon didn’t have the chutzpah to try to shut down the Associated Press.
Nixon’s list was personal and private and if John Dean hadn’t mentioned it in testimony, we might well never have dug it out and examined it. By contrast, Patel put his list in a book for everyone to see, and we’re also hearing Dear Leader’s people openly talk about jailing disloyal reporters and other troublemakers.
Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover kept those Big Brother fantasies to themselves, and the COINTELPRO abuses were done under the counter to specific people, not broadcast around to intimidate everybody.
But, hey, keep your shoes on: Patel says he didn’t say those things we heard him say, or compile that list that is in his book.
Anyway, it’s more interesting to watch the race between Tulsi Gabbard and Amazon to see who can screw up the intelligence services faster: The real one or the pretend one?
At least we know who bought James Bond and more or less what they paid for him. Who knows what turned Tulsi Gabbard into Russia’s girlfriend?
But Gabbard was confirmed, and why not? It’s Amazon ownership of James Bond that everyone is fretting over.
Brookes and Brown take Bond’s new American ownership as another sign of our changes in international loyalties. It seems more an opportunity to bring up Trump’s abandonment of Europe, NATO and Ukraine than a genuine concern over the Yanks taking control of a British legend.
Turner points out that we’re not sure what side Jeff Bezos is on anyway, except that he’s got businesses to operate and that’s likely where his loyalties lie.
Though perhaps he watched You Only Live Twice and has fantasies of Blue Origin satellites capturing Space X vehicles or gobbling down Starlink satellites like krill.
My own analysis of the move fits more closely with Rosen’s take: The worst case scenario of Bond being taken over by an American industrial giant is the potential for having the script-writing entrusted to a marketing committee.
Adams seems less shocked and more dispirited by one more step down that slippery slope.
Matt Pritchett, however, has his characters adopt the most positive view of these shifting loyalties, which is that Britons won’t have to spend a lot of money traveling.
Indeed we are entertained, if not by the preventable deaths of children in the developing world, by the war on paper straws and by funny heroes yielding chain saws on stage for our amusement.
After all, as the good doctor reminds us, we must set priorities, and apparently almost half of us have.
It’s not a matter of approval. The crisis is in the lack of disapproval.
Or, as Neil Postman put it, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
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