(I recently replied to a comment by Tien Le on Booman’s recent post The Response to Trump vs. The Response to Obama. It grew. Here it is as a standalone.)
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Tien Le wrote:
[The media] are not on our side.
Sadly Tien Le, the salient word in that sentence is “our.” The same goes for the title of your comment.
Who is “us,” exactly?
Looking at this blog over the past several years?
Looking at the media in general?
Damned if I know.
It is quite plain that both the NY Times and Washington Post are against both Trumpist forces and the true progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So…on whose side are they?
And once again, the answer is fairly clear.
They are “on the side” of the corporate-owned establishment duopoly, be it nominally Democratic or Republican. When Republicans cooperate with Trump…for quite understandable reasons of simple political survival if you take away any thoughts whatsoever regarding “morality”…they are the bad guys. When Democrats ally themselves with say Bernie Sanders, they are also the enemy, although since the Democrats did a much better job of isolating their left wing from potential power than did the Republicans of isolating their right wing, the neocentrist media can be much more…subtle…with the Sandernistas, etc.
Oh…they mean well, of course, but it’s obvious that they have no chance whatsoever of coming to power!!! Such nice people though. What a shame. What a waste!!!”
The center holds power by dissing those that are not part of its plans. It is, however, in the midst of a potentially seriously blown inning. Unless there are some real home runs hit in November…and from what I have been seeing they are not very likely…the game may well be over.
Trump 7, Everybody Else, 2.
I hope I’m wrong.
I just spent a couple of weeks immersed in Red Country, U.S.A., mostly the Eastern Pennsylvania area thereof. The last time I did that, I came back predicting a Trump win. Everybody and his brother on the progressive and neocentrist sides of the Democratic fence thought I was crazy. I wasn’t. I read “ANGER!!!”
This time?
I read “exhaustion.”
Read on.
The centrist/right wing news still pours out of the TVs in the Dunkin’ Donuts and such, but the volume has been turned down and nobody seems to be paying much attention. Life goes on. They’ve heard enough. They are more in a sort of party mood. Pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and everyplace in between. I was shocked late this past Saturday night…around midnight…when I drove through a smallish city, a fairly newly-rebounded-from-semi-collapse-on-the-Rust-Belt-model kind of city. It used to be basically closed up after about 10:30PM except for maybe a couple of serious drinker’s bars, but this time the long main street was lit up and cars were parked everywhere!!!
I felt the same thing in a jazz club where i have played for many years. A bigger crowd, more responsive to the music while simultaneously not paying it a great deal of mind.
In a party state of mind, and I do not mean Republican or Democratic “parties.”
Hmmmmm…
Short of a serious emergency in this country before November…Trumped up, CIA-created or real…I don’t think that the right, center or left is going to pour out in unprecedented numbers. The right already thinks that it has won; the left is feeling…well, it’s feeling beaten up by its own party, truth be told…and the massive center is sick of hearing all of the yelling.
Shut the fuck up, why dont’cha!!! I can’t hear myself not think!!!
Like dat.
My sample size may be too small this time…last time I drove hundreds of miles with short stops through NJ, eastern PA, southwestern NY right on up to Rochester and then back down through central NY to NYC. This time…straight through rural-ish NJ into rural eastern PA and a longer stay. But that’s the smell I’m getting outside of largely Hispanic areas like the Bronx neighborhoods that were the heart of Ocasio-Lopez’s upset win over Crowley. I have long held that bilingual Spanish people with fairly recent generational roots in Central and South America are overall much less likely to be hypnotized by the mainstream trance-media than are single language U.S people whose families have been here for a number of generations.
Maybe they will be our saviours.
I sure as hell hope so, because it’s beginning to look like we’re gonna need some.
Soon!!!
Later…
AG
