Political Theater

 How often have you noticed that news of real importance often gets completely overlooked while the entire nation, if not the world, focus their entire attention on vulgar triviality or another?

    Have you noticed that the political campaigns this year are all rather overly dramatic caricatures of traditionally intellectual, philosophical, economic, social, or legal issues?

    For example, look at the issue or immigration along with illegal immigration.  Once upon a time politicians would argue about whether more or less immigration was desirable, whether the criteria most important to consider was the skills and abilities of the immigrant or the familial connections they might have to people already in the country, what would be the most effective and just method of tracking and deporting those who violated those immigration laws, and other such details and semantics.

    Now the issue is one party in favor of open borders, acting to obstruct the enforcement of immigration law, provide subsidies to the illegals, including driver licenses or city ids, welfare, healthcare, education, public housing, and so forth.

    Politically, there is an open avowed socialist running for president deriding the wealth of billionaires while his potential rival is a billionaire, one of the wealthiest men in the world, openly appearing to buy the election.  And that’s just in the primary on one side of the political aisle competing to see who will run against the billionaire incumbent of the other party.

    We’ve witnessed political candidates openly offering to buy votes by promises of free college, free healthcare, higher salaries, with one candidate even promising direct checks in a guaranteed income.

    Meanwhile, many people aligned with that same party have been caught committing crimes which have been publicly disclosed, yet they not only walk away scot free but appear to be completely untouchable by the law, while people associated with the other party appear to be going to prison for years for incredibly minor offenses.

    It all seems sureal.

    Between ten to twenty years ago, for a period of time, as one aspect of his television career foray, Donald Trump had an association with professional wrestling.  It seems a fairly natural fit for one with such a bombastic public persona as Mr. Trump, much like his stint on his own show The Apprentice.

    This might be one of the most interesting perspectives on the entire Trump administration and political campaigns.  Have you ever actually watched professional wrastin’ (no, it is not spelled wrestling, it is wrastlin’, a sports entertainment theater as fake as CNN.)?

    The sports entertainment venue of “professional wrestling” spent years perfecting the art of combining faux athletics, soap opera theatrics, conspiratorial drama, and bombastic personalities all in the pursuit of the attention of viewers which translates into advertising dollars.

    After President Bush, the first one, made a speech at the UN applauding the dawning of a “new world order”, a phrase charged with nefarious implications for fringe conspiracy theorists throughout tabloid America who fret that the Illuminati are out to take over the world and the Bilderberg Society secretly runs the world; professional wresting cashed in on the phrase.

    In a long running plot line, a number of the wresting characters formed together in a wresting NWO (new world order) which mimicked in the wresting story line the conspiracies of an organization working behind the scenes to control the wresting world, corrupting and recruiting the prominent characters, with various other characters periodically rising up to oppose this group.

    The sports entertainment industry was great at selling villains, villainous organizations, lone heros, hero groups striving to save wrestling, along with a bunch of faked side stories about the characters’ personal lives, financial health, mental states, and anything else they could think to introduce, anything to keep the soap opera audience engaged hating the bad guys, cheering the good guys, and buying tickets, pay-per-views, and industry merchandise.

    Giving added credence and an air of authenticity was the ever present “referees” to make them follow the rules, which you watched being evaded or applied in a biased fashion depending upon the script, and “sports announcers” to provide commentary and spin and voice the audiences’ outrage while appearing as the sports version of “objective news”.

    Key to this theater was that everything had to be over-the-top and traumatic to keep the audience emotionally engaged and invested in the stories and in the characters.  Fans adored their favorite characters, rooting, cheering, and pulling for them even more vehemently than those sportsball fans.

    Back in the modern political theater, have you noticed all of the parallels between the news over the last ten years and the professional wrestling entertainment shows of a couple decades ago?

    Start with the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas becoming increasingly more separate and divided, changing positions while playing the good guys versus bad guys game.  George Bush promises “no new taxes”, then raises taxes.  Clinton sexually harasses a young intern and commits perjury but feminists protect him along party lines.  George W. Bush runs for a time as a conservative only to push government bailouts, and many conservatives suddenly abandon capitalism because the banks are “too big to fail”.  Obama declares the sanctity of marriage only to “evolve”, and homosexual marriage gets imposed by the courts reminiscent of abortion.

    True to form, the media commentators have some personalities cheering for each side, obvious in their support but claiming to be objective expressing public outrage for the voters to cheer and applaud.  Those news agencies spend as much time blaming the other outlets for their bias.  As time goes by they drop even their pretenses of not being biased.

    All of the hyperbole about not supporting this policy or that policy of the other party keeps getting supported by the budget, but that is not front and center in the news.

    Hillary is seen publicly as a larger than life villain, Bengazi investigation reveals incompetence, a private personal computer server, 33,000 deleted emails, ignored subpoenas, and so forth, yet one private tarmac meeting and charges are never pursued.  The villain is set up larger than life, touted as someone who can’t be beaten and destined to be the president.

    Out of the business/entertainment world, a new hero emerges to take on this villain, a bombastic personality, abrasive, financially independent, and most important for the fans, I mean voters, is willing to fight.

    In true villain fashion, Hillary taunts the rural supporters of her opponent as deplorables, as Obama had previously taunted that they were bitterly clinging to their guns and their bibles.  The champion for the deplorables gets so much media attention that eclipses the other candidates, and in true Wrestlemania fashion the upstart triumphs at the last moment against the villain.

    But that can’t be the end of the story.  We have seen the rise of a “deep state” conspiracy of people who seem to have banned together to bring down the “good guys” while seemingly immune from legal consequences for over-the-top obvious outrages.  “Deep state” even sounds ominously like that “new world order” or “illuminati”, infiltrating and hiding in the anonymous bureaucracy.  However, to their base they are “resisters” holding the line against the fascist usurper, so from the other side’s perspective the hero and villain tale is simply reversed.

    So again we look at the present election, the characters are not typical politicians, but exaggerated figures: the socialist, the billionaire, the dotard, the homosexual, the faux Indian, et cetera.  Interestingly, if Bloomberg buys the nomination, it will be the battle of the billionaires . . . all over again.  “Trump bragged about the ratings at Wrestlemania XXIII, where the “Battle of the Billionaires” took place.”  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/6-unreal-moments-from-trumps-pro-wrestling-career/

    Which raises an interesting question if this is all just coincidental similarities.  Why did President Trump retain huge numbers of holdovers from the previous administration rather than replace them like every previous administration?  Why did he empower the “deep state” when they were publicly stating what they intended to do?

    One can conjecture that he was trying to set them up to trap them?  Or that he was trying to reconcile the two sides by not being partisan?  However, it really makes no sense to retain people in positions of power who you know are actively opposed to what you claim to represent.  Did Trump empower the “deep state” for more theatrical reasons?  Or did I merely watch too much wrastlin’ as I was waiting to go to school after my paper routes as a youth?