A commenter on my previous post compared the Republican debates to The Gong Show. That was an apt comparison; several ditzy contestants – Cain, Bachmann, Perry – limped through goofy, wingnut song and dance routines, only to be gonged and given the hook.

The comparison is unfair to The Gong Show, since it didn't pretend to be anything other than lowest common denominator entertainment. These debates pretend to be a test of fitness for the most important job in the world. Hardly.

Instead, the interminable Republican debates are little more than infomercials during which candidates hawk themselves with prepared pitches, while an audience supplies cheers, boos and jeers.

In a real debate, one expects tough questions about policy and even tougher follow-ups when a candidate fails to answer the question. The only tough question at these debates is where did they find these people – the candidates and the audience?

•           •           •

Presidential primaries are supposed to be a deadly serious business. Or at least they used to be.

One can hardly imagine Dwight Eisenhower stooping so low. The precipitous fall from Ike to He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken is a pretty good measure of just how low the Republican Party has sunk in the last fifty years.

And as if things weren't low enough after He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul continue to do the linguistic limbo.

Limbo lower now – how low can you go?

•           •           •

Newt puts the blame for the dizzying decline in Republican politics on the media and charges that the media prevents decent people from running for office. Well, at least he can be credited with an inadvertent confession about the present sorry slate of candidates.

As for the media, there’s no denying it’s been on a long, ugly slide of its own since the days of Murrow and Cronkite. God knows, there was no equivalent to Fux News back in the day, save for newspapers that engaged in yellow journalism.

But those papers didn’t have near the influence, since their audience didn’t read much. Today’s audience for yellow journalism doesn’t have to read at all. Who knows – maybe they can't read – and they certainly can't think for themselves.

The ugly truth is that the news has become just another form of entertainment – just as writer Paddy Chayefsky predicted in the 1977 movie Network.

•           •           •

But it isn’t just television news that’s a problem – it’s also what else is on the tube. You could say television is the problem.

From the beginning, television depended on fiction for it’s success . One of those fictions is that television is free. It's not; the cost may be hidden, but we pay a very heavy price for all that fiction and fantasy.

That price includes the loss of the ability to differentiate between truth and lies, a loss attributable to operant conditioning. We have been conditioned by television to confuse fiction with reality.

Confusion now reigns, and the proof of that is “Reality TV”. Millions believe shows like Survivor or Jersey Shore or Housewives are real. These show are about as real as the WWF.

On the whole, television has little or nothing to do with reality or even art. It is a series of usually mediocre staged events to sell products, most of which don’t work as advertised. In short, it's an updated version of the old snake-oil salesman.

•           •           •

Television advertising is even more dubious and insidious than television programming, and it has an even more debilitating effect on viewer’s minds. Television is as perfect a tool as was ever invented for selling more shit to people who are already bathing in it.

Advertisers continuously interrupt fiction and fantasy with even more fiction and fantasy – or as they should rightly be called – lies; lies that products will make the hapless viewer happy, healthy and wealthy – get rid of bad breath and give a four–hour erection.

Millions sit, hour after hour, immersed in fiction and fantasy. And while they sit thus entranced, advertisers cough-up lie upon lie upon lie upon lie upon their heads. It's no wonder they no longer recognize what's truth and what's fiction. 

•           •           •

Ronald Reagan is a perfect example of the unholy marriage of television and politics. Somehow, he managed to convince a majority of Americans that Ozzie and Harriet was a documentary. He and his followers were – and still are – determined to return to a fiction, a fantasy that existed only on television – and in the fevered minds of viewers. Back to the future – evermore backward.

In reality, Reagan was a second-rate actor and soap salesman (remember Boraxo?), and he headed one of the more dysfunctional families in America. But never mind reality; he looked good on TV.

•           •           •

It’s no coincidence that the rise of television parallels the rise of retrograde republicanism and retrograde religion. Television politicians and television preachers share the same ability to use the medium to fleece their flocks, and most – if not all – share the same cynical attitude about their audiences – which have now become largely one and the same.

It used to be said politics and religion weren’t to be discussed in polite company; but in this impolite age, that warning goes unheeded – all the more so, since men of low degree have combined and corrupted both for political advantage.

Wise men from Jesus to Jefferson warned about mixing politics and religion. But Republican operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were obviously not so wise, and the marriage they arranged between the Republican Party and Kindergarten Kristians is turning out to be a marriage made in Hell. It’s poetic justice that the "saints" now want to run the whorehouse.

•           •           •

Given all this, is it really any wonder millions of Americans can't tell that MSNBC only slants the news, while Fux News pukes up outrageous lies?

Or that millions of Americans can't discern that Bush the Lesser was the antithesis of the American Dream, while Obama is the embodiment of it?

Or that millions of Americans can't see that Gingrich isn't redeemed, but that he is still a lecher and a reprobate seeking sex and selling snake oil?

Or that millions of Americans can't see that Mitt Romney represents not the epitome of our economic system, but everything that is wrong with it?

•           •           •

Republicans may once again succeed come November. If they do, it will be in part because their made for TV clown act distracted the public from the real issues, and it will be in part because they got away with the Big Lie that our present dire circumstances are the fault of one man in office little more than three years – rather than many men in office for the last thirty years.

But at some point, television, the present opiate of the masses, will not be sufficient to light the Republican pipe dream. The masses require more than televised circus – they require bread, too. The circus may be in town – but where’s the bread?

Man may not live by bread alone, but simplistic slogans and febrile faith in a failed system will not quiet hungry bellies forever. Soon – very soon I suspect – people will stop swallowing empty rhetoric coughed-up by a bunch of clowns.

And when they do, they will bang the gong.

©2012 Tom Cordle