WASHINGTON, D.C. 2017—Gerald Humphrey’s profound discovery began
when he realized the American mainstream media’s treatment of Donald Trump’s Republican
campaign for the presidency contrasted sharply with reality.
“CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and all the
other major news outlets in the United States kept taking Donald Trump much
more seriously than I would have thought any curious and sane investigator
would have a right to do,” said Gerald. “They kept listening to what Trump said
at rallies or on Twitter and then they talked or wrote about it a lot, without
ever mentioning the obvious truth. It dawned on me that a vast cover-up was
unfolding.”
Gerald surmised that the American press was embarrassed by
what Trump inadvertently was revealing about their political establishment. But
instead of alerting Americans to the appalling truth or calling for the revolution
that was evidently needed, journalists tried to treat Donald Trump as an
ordinary candidate.
“Even when the cable news programs featured angry talking
heads who were astonished by Trump’s audacity,” said Gerald, “hosts like
Anderson Cooper or Don Lemon would always strive to retain decorum or were
quick to inject some empty right-wing talking point to balance the proceedings.
“It’s like the emperor who’s strutting in public with no
clothes on,” Gerald continued. “Who’s going to be brave enough to be a witness
to the shocking truth? Who’s going to overcome the shame of living in a place
where the grand emperor could be so vain and gullible that he’d mistake himself to be
wearing fine garments that are allegedly visible only to intelligent people who
deserve to keep their jobs? Who’s going to yell out, ‘The emperor has no
clothes’? Apparently not the 'serious' American media: the absurdity was too much
for them, so they turtled up.”
For weeks Gerald retreated to the confines of his basement, refusing
to receive any news. “I thought maybe I was going mad,” he recalled. “How could
I see the truth that was as different from what was being reported to millions
of people, as night is from day? I mean, I wasn’t even in the news business!
But even I could tell that Trump had knocked over the applecart and that
anarchists should have been rushing up to him to thank him for proving their
point: Western civilization is a sham. The most powerful country on earth is
run by clowns in a circus and we keep stuffing our face with popcorn.”
Gerald was incredulous that political reporters would bend
over backward to avoid denigrating the American political system. “Some
anchorperson would be interviewing Trump,” said Gerald, “and I just couldn’t
believe the interview always lasted more than five seconds. The minute Trump
opened his mouth, any self-respecting journalist would have been obligated to
say to Trump’s face—and for the benefit of the viewers—‘No, Trump, what you
just said is retarded. Get the fuck off my stage, you psycho clown.’”
Political scientist Renaldo Blackenpuss, professor at
Pseudoscience University in Nowheresville, sympathizes with Gerald’s discomfort
with the media’s treatment of the Trump phenomenon. “Corporate media figures
are addicted to normality,” said the professor. “They’re not trained to uncover
the truth; not anymore, at least. They’re trained to spin facts to sell a
product to the beleaguered consumers, a product we call ‘the news.’
“Sometimes that involves distorting the truth to make it
seem salacious, to titillate viewers so they’ll keep their eyes glued to the
TV. Or it might mean ignoring a complex truth, offering up puff pieces or
scandals, because the news producers know that in their spare time consumers
mostly just want to vegetate or to act like ghouls. Or it might require throwing
a wet blanket on the truth, to protect the enterprises that fund the collapsing
journalism industry through advertising or that give journalists access to
heavy hitters who have that godsend quality of gravitas.”
“In hindsight,” said the professor, it’s become clear that “journalists
only pretended to care about objectivity, because most professionals want to
seem scientific.” When asked whether this charade affects political scientists
as well, Professor Blackenpuss hemmed and hawed and fiddled with the collar of
the lab coat he wore for some reason.
After the fiasco of the 2016 U.S. presidential election,
Gerald set out to determine whether the American media were engaging in other
cover-ups. “If our civic religion had degenerated to this extent,” said Gerald,
“where our political pageantry and rituals mean so little we might as well be
sacrificing babies on an altar to a sun god, what was our world really like? If
the media could perpetrate a pretense of this magnitude, what else could they
be hiding?”
What Gerald found shocked the world, earning him the
Pulitzer Prize. Recalling his monumental discovery, Gerald said, “I simply
looked really hard and then I saw it: the United States isn’t actually part of
what we thought of as the North American continent. Instead, for all this time
our whole country has been floating somehow, twenty miles above sea level.”
At his Pulitzer acceptance speech, Gerald was ambivalent. “When
I first saw the astonishing truth,” he announced, “when I realized that night
was day and black was white, the very next thought that came to me was: ‘Those
bastards!’ How could journalists have missed such a basic truth that was right
under their noses? Scientists could be forgiven, because they’ve made a trillion
other discoveries.
“But what were American reporters blathering on about while
no one realized the entire American landmass is physically disconnected from
the rest of the planet? What video of cuddly kittens were they featuring
instead as click bait? And what megaphone were they handing to an obvious
narcissistic, sociopathic buffoon and senile conman like Trump?”
Near the end of his speech, Gerald urinated on the Pulitzer gold
medal, but wasn’t shocked to see that the illustrious members of the audience
ignored his protest. No outcries were heard. According to Gerald
Humphrey, “they were fixated on the prize itself and on the system it
represents which would lie in ruins were it not for our credulity.”
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