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"It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That's the way to soften up a democracy."― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit
"
Nothing is real," observed John Lennon, and that's especially true of politics.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir's 1998 film
The Truman Show, in which a man's life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in
the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump
hush money trial, which panders to the public's voracious
appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry
distracted, diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer's seat, we'll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch — and I would posit that it's all reality TV, entertainment news included — the
more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
"We the people" are watching a lot of TV.
Comment: The US Naval Institute reports: Whilst Western militaries have been humiliated, yet again, and some analysts have commented that missions such as these do necessitate a rest period, could it also be that they're preparing for an escalation of another kind?