2024: A Space-out Odyssey

 

 

Joe Biden’s debate meltdown exposed the lies we’ve been systematically fed for months—probably years—about his health and mental capacities.

That’s one set of lies. There are others.

Narrative management is a useful skill, perhaps more highly developed here given our foundational relationship to the art of selling. We really know how to establish a story line and pitch it relentlessly.

At the same time, all those generations of commercial culture have induced in us a certain degree of skepticism. Growing up as consumers, caveat emptor comes with our mothers’ milk. We know how the game is played: you paint me a fantastical picture, and I discount two-thirds of it. We expect to be hustled and fed a line by everyone—peddlers of cars, toys, stocks, or flood insurance, office-seekers, and now modernity’s latest curse, paid “influencers.”

But while we understand that success isn’t dependent on a pitch’s attachment to facts, that doesn’t mean we like being cheated. Plenty of Biden sympathizers are royally pissed off that the party pooh-bahs shepherded rickety Joe through rigged or non-existent primaries to keep him carefully screened off from anything that would have exposed his disqualifying frailty.

Our cowed and complicit news outlets played along even though they must have known. Announcing that the emperor not only had no clothes but no working mind meant professional ostracism at least, as experienced by Axios reporter Alex Thompson, one of the few who dared to go off script.

The debate debacle leaves the Democrat establishment with no pleasant options. Early polls are predictably bad and set to get worse as safe blue states—New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico—move into the toss-up column, and that’s after just one week. More are likely to follow. Dumping Biden might stop the bleeding—or make it worse. At this rate Trump could pull off a Nixon- (1972) or Reagan- (1980) level landslide.

All the horserace talk, while amusing, obscures the other acts of narrative massage that are about to blow up messily. For example, we’ve been promised that our mighty (and expensive) military machine would power noble Ukraine to victory against Russia.

I remember an early panel discussion featuring Axis-of-Evil speechwriter David Frum (now a Democrat since it’s the war party). Frum confidently predicted that the Russian army would collapse as the troops were offered pleasant lives in Barcelona in exchange for deserting. Biden himself crowed that the Russian ruble would soon be “rubble.”  

Two years later, Russia is dictating terms of surrender, which become more humiliating with each iteration. That one will be harder to spin, and the panic over Biden’s Madame Tussaud act will pale in comparison.

Like the Biden dementia taboo, no one was allowed to question the fairy story about Ukraine’s imminent triumph. No one could doubt that Russia was a gas station parading as a country, “Nigeria with snow,” a failed, beaten state with drunk soldiers and rusty weapons. No one could suggest a compromise settlement or question the ongoing war and slaughter. That was all considered naïve Putin-enabling, the equivalent of cheering the Munich surrender of 1938.

We will pay a high price for the successful suppression of critical engagement, the homogenization of permitted speech, and the proliferation of bogus “disinformation” monitors, a.k.a. censorship boards policing our public debates. Like feeble Joe wandering off the public stage, we have been reduced to repeating stock lines and expecting rounds of stormy applause.

Reality has begun to bite. It won’t be pretty.