After This Election, I Can’t Tell The Difference Between Entertainment And Politics
Back in the day, when KFC was not a predetermined cluck, and SNL meant Saturday Night Live, we took our humor at face value. When we bit into that piece of chicken, it had anatomical bones. When we watched SNL, the characters felt much like Alice in Wonderland, jumping out of the page, to take a shot of whiskey neat, while dancing the fancy chicken.
Enter the fated political season of 2015–2016. It was truly tough to tell the difference between Larry David and Bernie Sanders, on SNL, so I asked the obvious question, “You remember that television show about the group of horrible people who talked about nothing for so long that they were thrown in jail for having nothing to say?” My boyfriend looked at me with scared surprise and said, “No.” I pointed at one of the men, on the Titanic skit, and said, “Well, he wrote that show.” The problem was that the two men looked so much alike that it was difficult to point to the correct offender.
There was also the incident with mock Hillary Clinton singing in a low voice, swinging on a swing, above a group of hungry yuppies, while asking for forgiveness, or friendship, or something like that. What was she doing there? Where was Chelsea? And, as I asked those questions, Bill showed up, playing a player piano, “Look, no hands.” Wait a minute, was that the real Bill Clinton, and if so, where was his saxophone? Pretend Ted Cruz fared no better, slurring and pontificating like his laxative had not kicked in yet.
There is a difference between celebrity and policy. When the media satire a political celebrity, there is no direct tie in or relevance to social policy, other than to open up the possibility of thought in a free market. The problem with the 2015–2016 election is that the line has finally blurred, and the everyday person cannot tell the difference. The media has become a part of the problem by creating the threshold of satirical relevance, giving politicians of all stripes permission to act badly.
When a media celebrity takes a role in a movie, playing themselves, in an event that is not real, they trade on their fame, and their reputation for hard, cold cash, hoping that we know, it is just a job, and to state “Look at me, mom.” Creating and enacting policy has very little to do with Trump’s ability to fire someone.
It is a harsh reality that this election cycle has lost all credibility because the line between real and pretend, as a way to pander for votes, in an information obsessed world, finally failed. The best response is to temporarily disengage from the television, the radio, the computer, the newspaper, and think about what is already known. Satire, whether real or imagined, is sophisticated humor. It is not the end result…belly laugh or not.
https://www.slantnews.com/story/2016-03-09-one-good-cluck-deserves-another
Originally published at www.writerbeat.com.
