07.01.16
Listen, Snob (continued)
“People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some connection to society. Most particularly, they don’t want to be dictated to by distant bureaucrats who don’t seem to care what they’re going through, and think they know what’s best for everyone …
“These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who’d exposed a tiny flaw in the system.
“[Self-congratulating] cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.
“Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy.”
In related matters, this sneering and very successful video from Comedy Central:
Thought experiment from the Listen, Snob desk: Do you think someone engaged in pulling the wings off flies for purposes of entertainment is teaching a lesson in civics at the same time? Or just someone who pulls the wings off flies for money? (Shooting fish in a barrel also cost effective as analysis.)
If you think watching cable comedians picking gobbets of flesh off the bodies of selected volunteers from the American polity to studio laughter in 2016 is brilliant work, we’re on different sides of the fence.