America's long IV Drip of Stupid
Mass and social media sources feed the poison to the people, but what if the election shows people are smarter than given credit for?
Part of the ugly feeling I’ve had since the U.S. presidential election stems not from the maddening choice of my fellow Americans, but the willingness of Democrats to operate on the same assumption media masters do: that the American people are stupid.
To make my point about the crass disdain modern media has toward voters, I’m going to jump to a boxing match.
I can’t defend whatever came over me the other night, but I tried to tune into Netflix’s glitchy horror show of a fight between a social influencer named Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, he of the teeth that chomp on ears.
The spectacle was a perfect mirror of today’s idiocracy.
I knew something was wrong as soon as I heard about the event about 24 hours before its supposed start time. But when I saw that Rosie Perez was the main commentator, I was reminded that we no longer live in a viable world.
This sensation, of course, had earlier come over me, like it did many people I know, when Americans chose a twelve-year-old in a 78-year-old body to take another shot at ruining their lives the way he did for so many while overseeing the Covid pandemic.
So the Tyson-Paul fight was simply another nasty reminder of the dumbing down of Americans in what I’m certain will be a deluge of reminders during the next few years.
I’ve always liked Rosie (what’s not to like, really?), but having her provide commentary on a boxing match is a bit like relying on me for financial advice (a wealth fund manager friend of mine once told me that if I had a million dollars, I’d spend a million and one).
The main event took forever to find its way to the cameras while Netflix entertained their waiting viewers with such things as women in tight sports bras pummeling each other. I repeatedly exited the scene, of course, by resuming my viewing of a Netflix movie (I love streaming violence as much as the next guy, but I prefer it directed in celluloid format). The pre-fight entertainment was too painful to watch. It was, like so many things in this day of social influencers and mad presidents, part of the long drip of stupidity injected into our veins every day by the purposeful, and poisonous, IV delivery system of modern media.
The announcers spent long hours hyperventilating about the importance of the fight, and how grand it was that a 58-year-old ex-boxer wanted to get into the boxing ring with a guy in his twenties who looked like he ran with the Georgia white nationalist street gang, Ghostface.
On top of all this, my body decided it was time for a serious health issue that began, appropriately enough, on election eve. Although I’m technically on the mend, I don’t feel like I am. My patience for the stupid schlock that American media feeds us is even lower than usual. It’s never been very high.
One can argue that American media just gives us what Americans want. I guess so, but, goodness, can’t they try just a little harder to see if Americans are willing to step out of the box of stupid for a few days?
Something happened to me on election night beyond the re-crowning of a mad king. I haven’t figured out exactly what. And I don’t know where it will take me.
I’ll admit to being a little frustrated by my health scare, too. It happened just as my Substack, Ruminato, was gaining some momentum. That’s life, though. We dust ourselves off and move on as best we can.
One thing I’m certain of in the wake of this disaster: I don't want Ruminato to fall into the trap of becoming part of a cottage industry that relies on Trump's existence to survive. I don’t feel like responding to his daily outrages for the next four years, or the outrages of his followers or successors. Besides, he's 78 years old. He barely limped into this election. His brain is mush. He will expire soon. His is likely to be a Weekend at Bernie's presidency. He’s showing a little life now, but I’ve seen enough end-stage dementia to understand that his days of coherence are mostly behind him.
As events unfold, I’ll try to recalibrate. I hope Democrats do, too. Our battle is not with Trump, believe it or not. It’s with all his enablers, including the low-information men who voted him into office. But what’s important to remember is that they aren’t our enemies, either.
What I’m about to say next is going to sound damning toward Kamala Harris, but it’s not meant that way. She ran a good campaign. She was in many ways the perfect candidate. But she’s also a child of a Democratic Party that has lost its way. I’ve written several articles on how Democrats should plug the essence of FDR, including a WPA 2.0, into their platform. And when they do, like Biden occasionally did, boast about it.1 But their problems go beyond a lack of creativity.
An obvious example: Somehow, they acknowledged that immigration is a problem. That’s the Republican position. It belongs nowhere near Democratic talking points. They’ve acquiesced on other issues, too, just like they did when another dumb president, Ronald Reagan, duped Americans into adopting stupid ideas. Instead of ripping the IV drip out of the American arm, Democrats have simply enthusiastically added to it.
There’s a huge electoral and strategic cost to this. Americans can see through the efforts of Democrats to be all things to all people. They recognize when Democrats pick up Republican talking points to grab a few more votes. Donald Trump is a lot of things that require words I normally reserve for describing human waste disposal, but he knew how to form a base and stick with it.
Maybe next time, the Democratic candidate for president will not boast about how they’ve stopped immigrants from seeking better lives for themselves and their children. Maybe they’ll help Americans recognize the vast contributions immigrants make. Maybe future Democrats will be bolder about expressing the vast chasm between multimillionaires and the rest of us. Maybe they’ll reject corporate funding of their PACs.
Maybe they’ll make a fuss about how the military-industrial complex gets first dibs on every tax dollar. Maybe they’ll stop cheering on war.
Maybe instead of saying, “I own a Glock,” they’ll say, “I don’t own a Glock, and I never will.” Maybe they’ll even do something like demand that all store-bought guns be wrapped in boxes depicting slaughtered children. They can use AI images if they have to, since no reasonable person would want to display the real thing that way.
Maybe they’ll become a true opposition party. Maybe they’ll even pledge to put an end to Reaganomics and whatever it is Trump stands for.
Democrats lose elections because they don’t stand opposite of the Republican platform. Instead, they often adopt part of it. The low-information voter sees this charade, and says, “Nah, I’ll go with the flamethrower because I’m tired of this schtick.” They’ve seen this show, and it looks just like other shows. It reminds them that nobody respects them, the same way the Netflix fight reminded them how little respect corporate media has towards them.
It reminds them of a bad fight between two people for whom they have little emotional investment.
And here we are.
The next time we yell at low-information voters for complaining about the price of eggs while they ignore what seems to be real danger signs of autocracy, maybe we should see to it that our Democratic leaders break up the three or four major egg companies that control the price of eggs.
