Red State/Blue State

When an irresistible force such as you Meets an old, immovable object like me You can bet as sure as you live   Something’s Gotta Give Something’s Gotta Give …   The old song rings true in this political season. An irresistible force of nature is the political electorate. The old school, and by that I mean the corporate and entrenched Establishment makes up the old, immovable object.   At some point, you know Something’s Gotta Give . Many people have predicted the death of the two-party system in this election cycle. We do have other political parties to be sure, but not powerful parties with any chance of winning the Presidency.   There is a Green Party, there’s the Libertarian Party, and other fringe parties and candidates. In other countries, there are various parties that must form coalitions in order to gain a majority to govern. That is where we are heading, I suspect. But not this time.   There’s a...

    With the success of Senator Chris Murphy’s filibuster this past week, perhaps the need for more of the highly entertaining spectacles, which many can understand better than the dull business of daily speeches and boring legislation on the Senate floor, might light a fire in the American electorate. Since the principle of the thing is at issue, why not screw your courage to the sticking place and come up with day long filibusters on the Senate floor to protest the lack of action on ….   Why not…? For Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland? Since there is a vacancy that affects almost every area of our life, why can’t they even give this man a vote?   Or… The Iraq War Vote ….?  The Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq and Syria? How can the State Department go ahead with a protest of 50 diplomats demanding action in the form of air strikes on Assad when there is no resolution for Military Action from the entire Congress? ...

  To understand the phenomena that is Donald Trump, I went straight to the source. The source in terms of understanding media is Marshall McLuhan.   McLuhan wrote Understanding Media over 50 years ago, and I wanted to find out if the ideas that were revolutionary then might still apply in the Computer Age.   Sure enough, some of the controversies and media hype surrounding this campaign season were things that could be plugged in to the ideas McLuhan wrote about in the sixties. For example, the idea of subliminal acceptance was one that McLuhan equated to be like a prison without walls. “If you cannot see where you are going, how can you be free?”, he asks. In that sense, the type of mindless pabulum that we, as viewers and consumers of mass media, have been subjected to, not only in the political campaigns, but through television and electronic devices and mass media at large come into question. We have become numb and disbelieve practically everythi...