More “Pierce-ing” Disapprobation

Why Is America So Happy for Facebook?
w/ Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo

If we cheer for big money simply as big money, we're simply never going to get right again. If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again. This was a triumph of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again, over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the institutions of self-government. This does nothing to ameliorate the effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing it with anyone.

Charles P. Pierce

Everything is garrisoned today. Everything is insulated the way that electric wires are insulated so that the power doesn't go anywhere it's not supposed to go. The country's political process is encased in technology so as to make it as safe and regular as it can be, so that the people within it can feel comfortable in what they're doing. It is not a contrivance. If it were, practically anyone would do it, and the Republican presidential primary field — to say nothing of the candidate it produced — is proof enough that that's not the case. It is, for lack of a better world, a kind of manufactured evolution, politics learning the techniques of distancing itself from the people politics purports to serve in the same way that those people have learned to distance themselves from each other, primarily through the insulating effect of new technology. We have grown accustomed to guns on the street, First Amendment zones, elections as televised design contests or exercises in competing virtual realities. The Obama headquarters is neither a symptom of this, nor is it the cause. It is simply a creature of the country it seeks once again to lead. We live garrisoned lives, so why should our politics be any different?

ibid. (ultra vel minorem)