portraits in cluelessness
watch as leader after leader struggles in the face of reality outside the hallucination
to walk among the people is a time honored tradition for politicians and leaders. it shows you are one of them, that you know them, that you see and hear them.
the “generation zoom” version of this august institution is the livestream. you pop up on instagram and people can come and ask you questions, post comments, send love, post emojis, etc. like many of the zoomer takes on historical practice, it’s a bit of a thin gruel and does not really measure up to classical praxis.
but it is not without the potential for hilarity.
if you live in a protected and curated ivory tower bubble and never actually venture out among the people, doing so can be a jarring experience as you meet a bit of the reality on the ground.
and this is no less so on livestreams.
this is a literal “let’s go brandon moment.”
she is helpless, transfixed and reeling, unable to even parse what she is seeing and bravely holding to her rictus grin to pretend that it’s OK.
but it’s not OK.
read the comments as they scroll by. it’s dazzling.
she is totally unable to absorb, much less spin what she is seeing.
she thought she was taking a victory lap and looking engaged. instead, she becomes a piñata for those she mistook for her adoring public. they have had it with her. and bostonians are world class hecklers. yessirree bob, they are.
the best she can muster is “cute tiger emoji” to one of the rare non-hostile responses. then she bravely tell us that “i love snow!”
her selection of only the fluffy questions and total avoidance of the real ones itself becomes the story. it speaks more loudly that any answer.
this is dissociation.
get to the end. it’s abject panic.
this is eva peron getting booed off a balcony by fenway bleacher bums.
it’s glorious.
next, we travel next to everyone’s favorite creepy replicant governor, gretchen “the uncanny valley” whitmer who last made an actual human facial expression some time during the clinton administration.
now, gretchen is a more sophisticated operator than michelle. she’s not going to make a rookie mistake like “letting the proles talk too.”
gretchen has come not to talk with us but to talk at us.
but it sure does not help turn this one into a good look.
“it’s against the law! it’s hurting the economy! it’s hurting our people! it’s an illegal blockade! it’s costing hundred of millions of dollars a day!”
see, now this is quite an interesting line of argument from the chief architect of one of the more restrictive (and likely illegal) state lockdowns in the nation. how much damage did your “blockade” cause to lives and livelihoods and educations and to medical care? how many $10’s or $100’s of billions were lost when you barred entry to and shuttered restaurants and bars and gyms and theaters and made everyone work from home in their jam-jams?
how many times did you hector the unvaxxed and champion making their lives unbearable, removing them from employment and from society until they complied?
sorry, but getting upset about a non-violent version of the same tactic being used in return as an attempt to stop the serving of the very meal you have so interminably dished out does not sound like much in the way of moral high ground.
one is left wondering if ms whitmer is even capable of rotating shapes in her head. this is akin to thinking that handing you a sneaker and then having you hand it back makes it into a completely different object with entirely new properties.
fortuitously, this “failure to rotate” does have some positive externalities as well.
for example, it provides a wonderfully accurate roadmap about what is working, and free people, like free markets, respond to just this sort of signal.
you need to go home!
of course, gretchen is FAR from the only one having issues with this notion.
justin “let’s wreck this place so i get to build back better” trudeau has been struggling mightily with the same subject matter.
here, let me rotate that for you.
can you see it now?
lol. j/k. i know you can’t…
and now they want police and military to come and quell the foment they have conjured.
and boy is THAT not going to be a good look. there is no way to arrest a bounce castle and not look like a weapons grade idiot and a tinhat despot.
brace for more failure to rotate. (or better yet, for failure to launch as these apparatuses of coercion simply tell them “no. we will not turn on peaceful people seeking nothing but freedom to prop up your narcissistic collectivist power trip.”)
this has devolved into every kind of possible weirdness.
imagine mistaking this for a good look (or an effective program).
it’s reaching the point at which i am legitimately baffled. how did these people wind up in power? on what criteria were they elected? how did anyone mistake them for honorable, capable, or even rudimentarily sane?
how did we seemingly select preferentially for an entire generation of leaders who cannot rotate shapes in their heads and whose fake “empathy” was just thinly veiled sociopathy hidden behind faux social justice pretexts?
i mean, was no one paying attention?
did they not realize that if you elect leaders who peddle nothing but hallucinations that they themselves would almost certainly inhabit complete hallucinations themselves?
we, all of us, should be insanely embarrassed to be being tyrannized by soy product muppets like this.
poe’s law tells us that without a clear indication of an author’s intent, any parody of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
but i don’t think this was ever supposed to apply to live speeches by politicians. the fact that this so avidly seems to be the case is not a sign that our society is healthy.
we desperately need to stop this.
stop electing platitudes and start electing actual people.
stop seeking ever more government and instead seek to roll it back, attenuate its reach, and to create ungovernable structures outside of it.
how much more “rule” by these people can you take?
i mean,
“i love snow!” That’s the new “Let’s go, Brandon” for politicians pretending they’re not getting shellacked by the power of the people! ❄️🐯☃️
"how did these people wind up in power? on what criteria were they elected? how did anyone mistake them for honorable, capable, or even rudimentarily sane?"
1) There was stuff on Netflix and our raid team needed us and they legalized pot.
2) The people who did vote discovered it didn't count.
3) The WEF had already decided who won. Every guest star on this post besides Brandon is a WEF Young Leader or World Scout or Fascist Cub or whatever.
guttermouth.substack.com