Joy: The Fairy Tale

Summer is on its last bony legs. As I write this we are less than 30 days out from the autumnal equinox which officially sticks the fork in the season’s withering carcass and signals the arrival of more dark than light/ more bouts of the shivers as we slide into another winter.

The Maine state agricultural experiment station’s newsletter announces that due to the heat of the lapsing summer, sequential sweet corn plantings are racing to maturity faster than anticipated and that the season will likely end sooner than we Kniblet-Knights/ Korn Kings/ Sultans of Silk had anticipated. Planting schedules based on the weather of summers-past become less reliable as we zealously pump yet more methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leave the “Goldilocks” climate (“to which human civilization is adapted”) in the Happy-Motoring rearview…….But I digress.

In a few days (Goddess-Willing) I enter my 79th year—— one shy of The Big Eight-O. My thoughts seem to turn increasingly to my younger years and the friends, classmates, and kin who have preceded me into the void. We came up in a different world back then in a land with abundant resources, an industrial base, a tendency toward rational thought (in our better collective moments), and a working class that could understand its situation and defend itself.

One of the other markers for end-of-summer is the “Labor Day” holiday. In our distracted land, labor’s day is warehoused at the end of something, unlike in Europe where it is celebrated on May Day when the season aligns with hope and promise, and the history of working-class struggle and gains still resonates. Here, the implacable powers-that-be deemed notions of international class solidarity too subversive and May 1st officially honors “Law Day” instead —— rather than those sweaty upstart “mechanics” and other wage slaves seeking to rise above their station. (“Only in America.”)

Right on cue, with summer’s dying, comes the vapid pseudo-event of the Identicratic National Convention where current Vice President Harris was officially nominated/ “coronated” as the party’s presidential standard-bearer without the un-helpful tedium of smoke-filled rooms, primaries, policy statements, or debate.

Thus was the present (though addled) Zionist-in-Chief (ZiC)  electorally erased and a brand new  prospective ZiC  subbed in. The media suddenly discovered the incumbent’s “cognitive deficits.” Then  “don” Pelosi made the doddering Prez an offer he couldn’t refuse. Suddenly establishment media have been all-in on the campaign’s PR sloganeering, unquestioningly adopting the DNC’s relentless  frames of laughter, “love” and Joy.

The UK Guardian (8/25/24) dutifully reports VP Harris enjoying “a post-convention glow but her policies are undefined.”  Those prickly Brits; “policies/ schmolicies“ as we used to say back in the 20th century.

The Guardian reported a huge “feelgood factor” hemorrhaging from the Chicago arena. “Euphoria” reigned. “In speech after speech, party leaders characterized Harris as a historic figure, the embodiment of hope, ‘the president of joy’ —— and predicted that she would defeat Donald Trump’s ‘politics of darkness’ once and for all.” (See Guardian, 8/25/24)

The late Neil Postman called BS on such cultural twaddle several decades ago in his indispensable “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” He bemoaned the post-rational  image-based world that was being shaped to create “the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

As was the rule at the captive-audience convention, today, we are fed quick-cut video imagery and “stories,” like children at bed time as a prelude to slumber.  Postman  continues, “I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.”

And as with news-adjacent infotainment, now politics is a funder/advertiser-driven distract-a-thon where image and emotion are, quite literally, the only show in town.

Postman’s warnings apply as much to our current political moment as media trends 30 years ago: …”In saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

What indeed?

Remember that Obama’s 2008 “Hope” campaign won “Advertising Age” magazine’s award for “Marketer of the Year,“ beating out such spinners/ hawkers as Apple and Zappos.com.

Expect a Hope, Love, (“Freedom?”) and Joy 2.0 blitz coming to a tele-screen near you.

To quote CSNY, 20th century guitar-band commentators during the summer of my life, — “Rejoice, rejoice. We have no choice….”

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