All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Trey Smith

I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.

The emptying of content in political discourse in an age as precarious and volatile as ours will have very dangerous consequences. The longer the political elite — whether in Washington or Paris, whether socialist or right-wing, whether Democrat or Republican — ignore the breakdown of globalization, refuse to respond rationally to the climate crisis and continue to serve the iron tyranny of global finance, the more it will shred the possibility of political consensus, erode the effectiveness of our political institutions and empower right-wing extremists. The discontent sweeping the planet is born out of the paralysis of traditional political institutions.
~ from The Globalization of Hollow Politics by Chris Hedges ~

It is hard for a political junkie like myself to have to admit that national politics, at best, has become vapid. On the surface, it appears to be energetic and interesting, but dig below the surface and you find, as Hedges states, it's hollow.

Politics today is all about soundbites, buzzwords, tag lines, focus groups, manufactured images and appealing to the basest of emotions. It's about sounding like a paragon of change and innovation without really meaning it! It's about saying (or inferring) just enough to appeal to the 99 percent without alarming the 1 percent. And it's about rich people trying to sell the middle class and poor on the idiotic notion that they have a scintilla of understanding what it means to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

On this last note, Mitch Romney has nary a clue. Neither does Barack Obama. Yet, come November, these will be the only viable choices.

Romney is multimillionaire several times over; Obama is a simple millionaire. Do you really think that makes much of a substantive difference? Do you think the guy who averages $1.5 million per year has any idea what it's like not to be able to find a job or to deal with the impending foreclosure (legal or not) on your home?