Politics as Entertainment
by John Lawrence, June 23, 2020
Trump is entertaining his base with campaign rallies and his other antics. What if, in response to one of his outrageous statements like "We've got the best testing in the world," someone got up and booed loudly? What if others joined in? What if fewer and fewer people came to his entertainment rallies, and everyone booed in unison? What if he had to be escorted off the stage by his secret service contingent? Am I dreaming?
Best testing in the world? One of my friends in her seventies called to make an appointment to get a test. They told her it would be 3 days before she could get an appointment and then 5 days before she would get the results. This makes the test next to useless. She could have died before she got her test results. Best testing in the world? I don't think so. Now UCSD is proposing to have a 24 hour turn around time for testing with kits placed around campus and their own lab for getting the results. This might allow students to return to campus. 24 hour turn around time is reasonable; 7-10 days is not.
Ever since Ronald Reagan the American people have been fascinated with unqualified entertainers as Presidents much to the detriment of American society. Americans are literally being entertained to death. But we demand to be entertained. And we are used to being entertained by uninformed, deliberately misleading information. Consider TV commercials. They don't give us accurate information. They are more concerned with selling us a product by any means necessary so they entertain us. What if a guy got on TV and said, "You know my competitor's product is actually a better value than the one my company is selling." This would be heresy, worse than any form of religious heresy. The perpetrator would be immediately fired from his or her job and banned to the hinterlands.
Entertainers with no expertise in government are in no position to guide this country. Americans elect them at their peril. In the last election Americans had a choice between an entertainer with no government experience whatsoever and a woman with the best curriculum vitae in American history. I don't agree with all the positions she had taken in the past, but there is no doubt she was more than well qualified for the job while Donald Trump was not. At least Ronald Reagan had been Governor of California.
Fake news has led us to a fake President in Donald Trump. The most unprepared and governmentally illiterate President in American history. Yet people bought all his buffoonery and fakery because that is what they are used to. That's what they like. They as well as the President are illiterate in citizenship by and large, at least those in Trump's so-called "base." Critical thinking is not the hallmark of Trump's base. Hitler entertained the German people with torchlight parades and campaign rallies. Trump hasn't gotten to the point of torch light parades yet, but he is getting there.
