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Make Politicians “Boring” Again
Don’t Get Distracted by the Spectacle of “Entertainment”
“Have the Cabinet picks always been this entertaining?” American comedian Zoltan Kaszas gushed to a club crowd. He seemed equally confused and amused. “I’ve never paid attention to the Cabinet picks,” he admitted before comparing Trump’s recent picks to the WWE. (For non-Americans unfamiliar with the WWE, it is a nationwide soap opera featuring athletic actors theatrically playing characters/wrestlers with fabricated backstories and artificially binary good/evil dichotomies to sell air time and themed merchandise. While wearing gaudy costumes that must be three things: skimpy, tight, and shiny.)
After three MAGA campaigns, Americans undeniably prefer entertainment spectacle to qualified candidates running our government. And racism. Terrifying predatory racism. Now a garish and bigoted grifter represents 330+ million Americans in all matters of international diplomacy and domestic policy-making. Again.
In the gruesome theater of American politics, we don’t want equality, we want to be entertained and we want our hatreds validated and amplified. It seems we want cruelty and we want blood.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Paris’s Grand Guignol Theater offered audiences the spectacle of “amoral horror entertainment”, a genre popular since the early…
