The nonsensical fact-free mess sometimes referred to as America isn’t even a place anymore. It’s a psychosis in many ways. Babble is an economic and social factor. It’s not helping that America doesn’t look into mirrors anymore either.
Misinformation was a simple thing to manufacture, and it’s been around for a long time. The Trump years were the hatching, not the start, of this dishonest, astonishingly but genuinely stupid, culture. America’s one and only illiterate president was the perfect cardboard cut-out and talking sound stage for a long, shabby, ugly history of information bias.
Arguably the first known incarnation of this now-endemic obscenity was during the first Obama election. There was a waiting cadre of practitioners for the non-information. The Tea Party (remember them?) the maniacal Birthers (remember them?) and of course the talkback skanks (the ones who made huge money out of it) did the work. Q, the obvious savior of something to someone, took up woodwork after disrupting the entire country for years. Meh.
Conspiracy theories are just recipes for more of the same in this environment. There are cut-price cans of beans in supermarkets in low-income parts of Nowheresville USA which will always have more facts in them than this trashy stuff.
Ideology? Who needs it? Left? Right? Hardly. Who cares? It’s money. Try Whiter and Brighter. …Because that’s exactly what it is.
The high turnover of disposable groups like Tea Party nuts and Birther ignoramuses simply reflected market moves. These guys were paid applause (rock bottom media) at best.
The image of any type of marketing is based entirely on perceptions, not facts. The focus moved, so they were replaced with other images, like Trump, as focal points for elections.
Manufacturing absolute garbage and calling it information is actually a very well-known business. It IS nothing but marketing. Nobody, particularly the people writing it, believes it on any level. It’s like writing low-grade direct marketing schmaltz, just much less trustworthy in factual terms.
Much of this misinformation is in the “cyanide is good for you” category. The damage to the nation is all too visible, and scrupulously ignored by just about everyone.
Polarization is a product. It works. How else would a mass of random people who’ve never given a damn about things they can’t even spell become a “movement”?
Politics, arguably the most destructive agent in human history, is the venue. That’s it. Doesn’t matter the subject, or the context; It makes huge money.
It’s exactly like direct marketing:
- This (unspecified) product will make you rich, improve your sex life (insert VISA, Mastercard, and AMEX links)… And all your little friends will admire you in Godknowswhereville USA. You saint, you.
- Someone in a tree thinks it’s fabulous. This tree-dwelling genius made (whatever as long as it looks good) (insert VISA, Mastercard, and AMEX links)… ad nauseam.
So where is America? Guess, because there’s no other way of finding it.
To the world’s utter bafflement, the biggest, most successful country in history has turned into a collective babbling imbecile. Prosperity was the norm. Now insanity is the fact. The Best of Everything is now a primitive, drooling, unsanitary hellhole.
A well-known creek was installed, and paddles forbidden. Drowning is expected and actively encouraged. America’s guilt-and-apparently-self-respect-free media have actively participated in the process.
There were giants once; now there are highly-trained professional nothings/nobodies pretending to be somethings/somebodies. In prosperous America, they’d be called losers. Now, they’re disposable gods.
Every sentence from the machine is an excruciating exercise in “proof of ignorance”. …And you’re buying it? America, where the hell are you? There’s a clue in that question.
