the trump phenomenon is explicable. today i was listening to martin o'malley on diane rehm. he called 'boldly' for 'common-sense gun legislation'. then over the course of a few minutes he used the term 'common-sense' about 40 times. for an hour, he said the same sentences over and over, adding nothing substantive and displaying no passion. well how could you be passionate about a vague sentence that you've spoken hundreds of times? the dems focus-grouped and polled 'common-sense' as an adjective twenty years ago, and they have all been muttering it continuously ever since. this is the sort of reason that i once asserted that al gore does not exist. fifteen years later, they're still muttering the same emptiness, without surcease. american political discourse is the most boring, inconsequential, empty, repetitive, banal, asinine bullshit that ever infested human language: a refutation of communication.
the politicians have a theory of communication, straight from...oh, the annenberg school or whatever: the only reason people talk is to manipulate each other. reality is irrelevant or non-existent; what matters is how reality is 'framed' rhetorically, which also has nothing at all to do with who the speaker is or what she believes. the most effective way to make people agree with you or buy what you're selling is to emit the same extremely simple message over and over again (='message discipline'). probably, there is empirical data supporting these assertions. that doesn't mean it's not a formula for total emptiness and miserable dishonesty and self-concealment. it doesn't mean that people who talk as recommended don't sound like cretins. you can't subject a nation to this for decades and have people come out caring at all about 'what' 'you' are 'saying', or about the political system at all. a national politician who expresses himself with any connection to his words is something we haven't seen since, like, goldwater and kennedy or something. hillary clinton, who has the most extreme version of this, is not anyone, ok? it is physically and emotionally impossible to care about her candidacy or commit to it. what would you be caring about or committing to? literally, nothing.
