cory booker's nausea dominated cable news this week and illustrates all that is mind-numbing and full of shit about american politics. political parties and campaigns actually try to produce collective consciousness through simulated unanimity. if we all say the same words in the same order we will cease to be distinct persons: a fantasy of solidarity and an index of self-loathing. the campaigns send out 'surrogates,' all of whom must pretend to believe exactly the same things; to belong and to rise in our hierarchy, you're going to have to pretend not to think, not to have any opinions or even words of your own, not to be a particular human being: in short, not to exist at all.
booker went 'off-message' or even 'off-script'; he 'went off the reservation.' well, why do i need cory booker reading someone else's script? is he appearing as a person or a character in a sit-com? do i really need to confine cory booker to a reservation? people started talking about whether booker's political career could survive his disagreement with the thrust of a particular campaign spot. agreement was enforced upon his mouth, goodness knows how. it had to be more or less: take it back, or you'll never work in this town again. personaly i think you'd better make a little room for actual individual differences of opinion. when i listen to cory booker, i want him to speak his own words, or else i want you to put the person who's actually speaking on television. there really is no reason to have squads of people to all say the same thing; a basic understanding of television might suggest that you could just play an obama soundbite or ad over and over instead of lining up marionettes to recapitulate it every hour for days.
here's one slight drawback of the simulated agreement: you just know that much or most of what the political consultants, party leaders, and surrogates say is totally insincere. or they are beyond sincerity or insincerity: when they say 'unemployment' or 'austerity' or 'immigration' or whatever it may be, the term does not refer to unemployment or austerity or immigration: it refers to their need to belong and their ambitions. the words are not connected to their referents, but to your head, which they are trying to manipulate. at that point, it really could just be nonsense syllables, as long as we are producing them in unison. then you wonder how people can be so apathetic; you'd be better off trying to explain how anyone could ever pay any attention at all. there can be no reason to.
people always regard politicians as dishonest, which i propose is the only rational response to the state of our political discourse. now there are various dimensions of honesty. you might have a secret life, like john edwards, you might be massively corrupt. those things are occasional. but the insincerity or trans-sincerity is universal. the only reason you're saying that is to manipulate me, and someone else wrote it based on focus groups: that could not be more obvious or more continuous, and it is certainly a form of dishonesty. this is why the only useful or interesting people (or, indeed, the only people) in american politics are folks like bernie sanders and ron paul.
