Monday, January 19, 2009
Manufactured to Mollify
While the theatre of presidential pageantry is manufactured to mesmerize an infantile audience, the cult of personality that precedes this pageantry is manufactured to mollify. Within this mediation of culture, citizens-as-consumers are raised on a daily diet of pablum like The Man from Hope (Clinton) or The Candidate of Hope (Obama), never once pausing from the spectacle to recognize the blatantly obvious pattern of repetition used in soothing their anxieties. By the time they have been stuffed with bromides ad nauseam, the helpless have become so hopeless, that fleecing them is like taking candy from babies.
