Sunday, May 4, 2008

Sound Bites as Props in the Political Theater

Dear George,

All politics is theater, a smokescreen built of empty words and third-rate stage sets. Your mastery of this smokescreen is why you are sitting in the Oval Office.

The Democrats just don’t get it! Where once politics flowed from Aristotle, they now flow from MTV; where once image reflected reality, it is now a departure from it. The music video with its rapid-fire cuts from scene to scene, each scene lasting no more than a nanosecond, has given birth to the sound bite.

Ideology is all. That’s where you have it all over the Democrats. At its core, ideology is a gastrointestinal issue. The Left suffers from intellectual diarrhea while the right suffers from intellectual constipation. Thank God tiny turds make the best sound bites.

And the Right knows how to play the Democrats. The Right’s sound bites come at them like a salvo of spit balls. You let them rip, and the next thing you know, the Democrats are off balance, flailing away trying to hit back at you.

The sole purpose of the sound bite is to force your opponent into elaborate explanations. The more they explain and expound, the sounder the electorate sleeps. An electorate breast-fed on reality TV and game shows doesn’t want substance. They want audacious tale telling. Knowing this, you have dipped into that great American tradition, the folk-tale, and brought it into the twenty-first century. Where the nineteenth century had Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, the twenty-first has the axis of evil and the global war on terror.

It appears that your successor, HillBill, has mastered the same skill set.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

2 comments:

Mark Prime (tpm/Confession Zero) said...

Thank God tiny turds make the best sound bites.

Hoooooo Agggghhhh!

HillBill is certainly mastering the art of of making me cringe. It used to be only Bu$hco that could do that...

Case Wagenvoord said...

I think she's a clone.