Monday, September 18, 2023

What Am I Seeing?

 “I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumors: in her personal time, congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!),” said Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign manager, in a text message, adding that Boebert “pleads guilty to singing along, laughing and enjoying herself.”

This same campaign manager insisted that the fog that was witnessed by other theatergoers was smoke produced by the special effects from the production. The mutual groping seen on the closed-circuit video from the between Representative Boebert and her date was all a part of supporting the performing arts. 

I could go on and on about "representative" Boebert, but this one is really more about folks like Drew Sexton. The people whose job it is to grab us collectively by the ears and avert our gaze from the painfully obvious. Those who cherry-pick snippets of audio and video to show us how we've been wrong from the start. Those folks at the Capitol on January 6 were "just tourists." Andrew Clyde, another "representative" said this about the footage from that day: “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures, You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

And no matter how many times you hear it, the former game show host's "perfect phone call" to the Georgia's Secretary of State, it still sounds like election interference. But the twice-impeached "president" continues to stress how perfect that call was. An hour of dubious claims and skewed reality is the loser of an election trying to get just 11,780 votes.

Perfect. 

Now we turn our attention to the news outlets who would like to clip and snip events to present reality in a way that can only be described as artificial. One hundred years ago, a cat named Sergei Eisenstein made his name by cutting pieces of film together in such a way that meaning could be manipulated. Luis Bunuel made a "documentary" called Land Without Bread about ten years later that pointed out the relation between what is seen and what is heard behind the pictures. These guys were foreigners of course, but Faux News learned their lessons well. 

Propaganda. Repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it. - Joseph Goebbels.

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