Poor Britany! Poor Paris!

[3113]

Right down to the pancake breakfasts. What a lovely, down-to-earth feeling it evokes when a small town opens its doors and hearts to offer a tasty, home-style breakfast of pancakes with lots of good, American dairy butter and Vermont maple syrup, or maybe New Hampshire maple syrup if the organizing committee has been on its political toes, to the men and women competing to become the front man for the most powerful person in the world.

Babies are kissed. Hands are shaken. If all goes well, no one confuses the two procedures.

Best of all, the pancake breakfasts provide a forum where the future Commander in Chief (and the runners-up, and the future Miss Congeniality) can set aside political posturing, loosen his necktie, leave the Lear jet someplace miles away, and arrive on a humble bus to mingle with "the people" and hear their concerns.

The people are those hearty, no-nonsense Americans whose ancestors arrived on our shores as poor immigrants, their landlords, or hardcore religious fanatics, and set about building a nation. With the help of native Americans, who helped the pilgrims survive a harsh winter and inspired the first Thanksgiving Day, these stalwart pioneers killed or humbled the less helpful natives, fought and won the War on Witchcraft, conquered the wilderness, conducted a violent overthrow of the government, introduced multiculturalism by importing African men and women to work their vast plantations, and wrote the Bill of Rights when they realized they were in danger of doing to each other what had once been done to them. They also invented pancakes and maple syrup. But not butter; Canada invented butter.

The pancake breakfasts are America's way of reminding those Washington Politicians that they're no different from us ordinary folk. Except for their funerals, which are pretty spectacular, and their virtual immunity from criminal prosecution, and the fact that they never, except when arriving at a pancake breakfast, have to ride on a bus.

The tradition might be old-fashioned, but without it, how would we know our candidates and how would they know us? Not from polls, that's for sure! Polls are nothing but a tool of Washington Politics. For that, there are campaign strategists, analysts, and one or two actual decision makers who remain invisible. They might direct policy, but they don't make pancakes.

Only by shaking a man's baby, kissing his hand, and donning his apron for a photo op at the local YMCA, can a candidate for president hope to compete against Britney and Paris for a couple of minutes of prime time TV.

*Sniff*

That was beautiful (waving the little red-white-and-blue flag that was stuck in my stack of delicious, buttermilk pancakes and thanking the God-fearing Boy Scout who politely served them to me).

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

So... if I'm understanding this accurately... the politicians and the corporations are distracting America through Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton?

 

[Guest]

So... if I'm understanding this accurately... the politicians and the corporations are distracting America through Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton?

Nahhh.

Tits just sell magazines.

 

[cumallday]

So... if I'm understanding this accurately... the politicians and the corporations are distracting America through Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton?

They don't have to. Jello's law states: "The dumbest buy the mostest".

 

[TE999]

They don't have to. Jello's law states: "The dumbest buy the mostest".

Actually the dumbest buy those vapid magazines and newspapers at the supermarket check-out stands that endlessly feature these useless people.

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the buying public.

Peace.

 

[tmtrouble2006]

I guess if you go commando you get judged a little harshly when it comes to fashion....

POOR US!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[shereads]

Nahhh.

Tits just sell magazines.

And magazines sell tits. It works out well for everyone!





<cue chorus>

"It's the circle of life..."

 

[shereads]

So... if I'm understanding this accurately... the politicians and the corporations are distracting America through Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton?

Is that what you got out of this? Where? How?

Sure, people are distracted, and our hunger for celebrity gossip is killing serious journalism. But the blame lies with ourselves. What we don't watch or read, the commercial news media have no reason to produce. Advertiser-supported television and print media cater to advertisers and stock holders, not politicians. To a certain extent, that's even true at Fox News...sometimes.

 

[rgraham666]

I now refer to Fox News as The Ministry of Truth.

After the way they retroactively decided Foley was a Democrat I couldn't help but notice the parallels between them and Orwell's work.

 

[cantdog]

The thing about being in charge of America is deciding what you want to do with all this projectible power. There's a thin layer, on the surface of the government, of elected people, but the apparatus is mostly composed of people who went to school for this-- experts. Neither the one group nor certainly the other attaches much importance to the democratic. They want to be left alone, as the experts they are, to direct their power as they see fit. A lot of their opposition comes from competing groups of experts, just as in any management, but with the complications of party. But they know that much opposition may also be expected from the people. They manage competing experts in the ways familiar to anyone who works in an office setting, and they have to manage the people, as well.

We live in a golden age of the art and science of manipulating the masses. Net advertising spending goes up every year on a fairly steep curve, unfailingly in the postwar era except for one hesitation of leveling in the mid-nineteen-seventies. Advertising has moved to branding, now. Projecting a set of images to associate with the brand. There's a deal of skill and technique available for these purposes.

You can go to school for that, too. And since government requires to manage and minipulate the masses, wouldn't they be fools to ignore those techniques?

But I think you missed the drift, Joe. Paris and Britney were charaxcterized as being separate from the governmental manipulations. Check it again.

 

[shereads]

Advertising has moved to branding, now. Projecting a set of images to associate with the brand. There's a deal of skill and technique available for these purposes.

<blushing>

Thank you. We are so rarely appreciated by you, the manipulate-ees.

Any golfers out there? My client has some swampland that can be drained, lickety-split.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Considering how bony Paris Hilton is, she DEFINITELY shouldn't walk around without her panties on. Someone might confuse her pelvic bone for a boner.