"...Chris Hedges calls it “junk politics.” Gore Vidal calls it “show-biz politics.” What is it for? It’s a diversion. It is what keeps Americans from thinking or feeling too deeply about the astounding inequities perpetrated by the corporate kleptocracy in charge. Such as the fact that, after precipitating the meltdown that has created a chronic unemployment rate of 20%, the financial sector still calls the shots in Washington. Or the fact that while millions of their fellow citizens were pitched out of their houses onto the curb over the past three years, their government is seriously considering preserving tax cuts for families earning over $250,000. Or the fact that while white collar criminals make bonuses the size of a Third World country’s GDP, one out of seven US citizens lives in poverty. Pretend Politix has so diverted the national mindset that, even among those struggling one-in-seven, the rich-white-guys’ game drives the narrative.
Good reasons to reject Pretend Politix range from its ethical repulsiveness to our own financial self-interest. But such is the power of group-think (note the placement of US Neptune in the 9th house) that, in a country as obsessed with money as the USA, where public coffers are so bottomed-out that schoolteachers have to cough up their own money to buy books for their students, the public sits back and accepts as perfectly normal the obscene avalanches of cash wasted by Pretend Politicians mounting their campaigns.
There are linguistic reasons, too, to spurn Pretend Politix. Anyone who holds out the hope that language might mean something – that words are vehicles to express the moral dimension of humanness — can’t help but recoil from the tritely earnest hypocrisies that stumble out of the mouths of politicians from Left and Right; their obvious artificiality an insult to human intelligence and a crime against language. Corrupted further by each repetition, the cliché-sodden teleprompter speeches that have become the norm in Pretend Politix should automatically disqualify the speaker and everything s/he stands for from being taken seriously. The fact that they do not is a testament to how low the public’s standards have sunk......"
Quote taken from MotherSky 'Pretend Politix' by Jessica Murray
