21st Century Wire says…
It’s official: the mainstream intelligensia have lost the plot, and yes, it’s definitely Trump’s fault. With each passing day, it’s becoming more obvious that truth is not the only casualty here, so is irony.
To understand the depth of the irony at play, you should recall the uber-fashionable mainstream pronouncement – that the good men and women living in the valiant West are now living in a “post-truth world.” The irony of the Establishment’s appropriation of this term was lost on most people, not least of all the liberal intelligensia and champagne socialites who took so much pride in parroting their new etymological creation. For those who consider themselves aligned with the great and the good, the idea of post-truth is meant to depict the unholy scourge of fake news on social media which they firmly believe was engineered by the Kremlin to deceived the vulnerable hordes of uneducated, red hat-wearing deplorables, thus helping Donald J. Trump sweep into power in 2016. As ridiculous as that proposition might sound to the educated and informed person, members of the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ still believe this to be true and their confidence is derived not from any preponderance of evidence of Russian ‘Interference’ or ‘Collusion’ (to date, there is none), but rather because these narratives have been repeated incessantly over the last two years on outlets like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. The real irony is that it that they have constructed their own post-truth reality, constantly reinforced by narratives which remain devoid of any actual evidence to substantiate the central charge of ‘Trump-Russia Collusion.’ Their unshakable faith in this narrative is held firmly in place by a confirmation bias resembling religious dogma. The media’s beatification of Robert Mueller III reaffirms this phenomenon.
So it’s the Establishment, led by their cluster of highly-paid (and highly partisan) TV comedians who are marinating their respective flocks (and themselves) in an endless, self-replicating series of ‘post-truth’ narratives, thereby constructing the very “post-truth world” they purport to be warning society about. No matter how many times you rinse and repeat them, by the time history is finished digesting them, politicized narratives will never be truth, they are simply propaganda which in this case, is aimed primarily at the domestic American audience.
As far as the epic Mueller Investigation goes, that level of religious belief has taken on some rather symbolism:
I was not joking about the proliferation of worshipful objects featuring Robert Mueller's saintly visage https://t.co/EzmLbfOELH pic.twitter.com/QjTa95qXo1
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 10, 2018
Some might call this post-comedy, but it well beyond that. The logical progression of the reverse flip of ‘post-truth’ leads us directly to post-irony. In other words, the professional joke-makers are working so hard to construct their own parallel reality that they are unable to detect the ironic scene which they are now performing in – in which they have become the joke. Nowhere is this political and intellectual malaise more obvious than in mainstream American TV comedy which, with all its anti-Trump and anti-Russian zealotry, has reached such heights of banality that the comedians have become clowns, unknowingly parodying themselves. At this point, public discourse descends into a degenerative state, which reinforces existing polarity – which leads to more political and social dysfunction.
Meanwhile, the world moves on, even if partisan stakeholders are still stuck at the date November 8, 2016 on the time-space continuum.
The following is a passage from a recent article by Michael Tracy in The Spectator which illustrates the bizarre veneration of Mueller…
For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention.
Hopes for Mueller as a savior-figure are perhaps expressed most fervently in the realm of TV comedy, where the unifying theme is universal contempt of Trump. Hating the president is one thing: that’s natural, and perhaps even healthy. But the hate exhibited by contemporary late night comedians is so predictable and banal that it feels like a dreary commercial monoculture, with nothing interesting or surprising ever said. Firing off zesty jokes about Trump’s personal vulgarities is, today, the farthest thing from subversive humor, and generally evokes not laughter but a keen awareness that the joke-tellers are all operating from the same wearisome premise. So in search of a comic foil, the TV hosts have latched eagerly onto Mueller, the former FBI director and George W. Bush appointee.
The pinnacle of Trump-era comedic banality, Saturday Night Live, set a new standard for worshipful absurdity last week when they offered up a Mueller holiday tribute song, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You,’ professing their anxious desire for him to issue a Final Report that lands Trump in the Big House. ‘I just want to sleep at night. Please make sure your case is tight,’ the assembled comediennes sang, while a portrait of Mueller wearing a Santa hat levitated overhead. The cutesy carol made reference to Trump-Russia bit-players such as Roger Stone and Alex Van Der Want – the latter a man so obscure that you have to be a real obsessive to have the slightest idea who he is. It says much that SNL writers apparently assume their viewers are as fanatically invested in every minute twist-and-turn of this saga as they evidently are.
SNL’s tribute came almost a year to the day after the Late Show with Stephen Colbert debuted its own suspiciously similar segment, entitled ‘Robert Mueller’s 12 Days of Christmas’, in which a holiday choir also expressed holiday-themed anxieties related to the Special Counsel’s prosecutorial progress. ‘On the first day of Christmas, Bob Mueller gave to me, a Michael Flynn guilty plea,’ sang the choir, while the live audience compliantly roared. Whether the audience at home roared similarly seems doubtful. At this point, Colbert’s paeans to Mueller are as regular a feature of his program as interviews with boring celebrities. In another chortling segment, ‘‘Tis The Season For Treason: A Very Mueller Christmas,’ Stephen himself sings a short lyric commemorating the arrest of Paul Manafort, and expresses optimism about the yuletide cheer his imprisonment could inspire.
(…) Sometimes this pro-Mueller yearning can take on genuinely creepy overtones. Just last week, hostess Samantha Bee, in yet another segment that concluded with a Christmas wish for the entire Trump family to be incarcerated, admitted that she feels ‘turned on’ by Mueller..
(…) If the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a passion that cannot be conducive to mental health – or for that matter, political efficacy. One feature of the Mueller saga is the enormous amount of energy that has been expended on venerating and defending him; energies which, at least theoretically, could have been directed toward doing something useful. The trend seems to reflect the total political enervation of this class of people – elite liberal culture-producers and consumers – who are still whipsawing between two-bit schemes to topple Trump, while in the process glossing over (or ignoring, or ridiculing) the structural forces which gave rise to Trump in the first place. Their expressions of comedic angst actually render them more and more politically impotent. Democrats’ success in the midterms may have given the false assurance that a critical mass of the country actually respects this drivel…
Continue Michael Tracy’s article at The Spectator
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