Sunday, November 20, 2016

Newscasters Normalize their Relations with Our Alien Overlord Tromp

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.Major media personalities strive to retain their credibility after being forced to appear naked on television by our alien overlord Tromp.

Tromp, mastermind of the invasion from Pluto, created mass panic when he landed in the United States in November, 2016 in a fleet of golden skyscraper-shaped spacecrafts. But the corporate media calmed the public by normalizing Tromp’s incursions into what had hitherto been the normal business of distracting or scaring the news consumers with scandals so they would seek relief by buying the advertised products.

“It began innocently enough,” said Don Lime, host of a CNN news hour. “Tromp’s ship landed on top of the White House, crushing it. Even I screamed like a little girl when that happened—and I was live on air! Then my producer shouted into my earpiece: ‘Where’s your gravitas, your savvy, your objectivity?’

“So it occurred to me I had to be brave for the viewers. I locked away my true self and began coldly narrating what transpired. I was like a robot, just observing and describing in the most neutral terms I could think of what was perhaps the greatest disaster to have befallen our nation as if it were barely even newsworthy.

“When Tromp kicked a baby’s head off, I admit I struggled. How to help prevent a human uprising that could cost millions of lives? How to do my job with dignity and avoid alienating Tromp in case he should decide he’d like to come on my show, perhaps be a regular guest or even a co-host. My producers drew up the contract and everything, so that was in the back of my mind: I had to play it cool with Tromp, because as hideous and inhuman as he was, he was now in charge.”

But then Tromp and his minions decreed that all media personalities, including pundits, analysts, and hosts, would have to perform their on-air television duties nude and uncensored.

“I was taken aback when I heard that one,” said Megyn Sally, journalist and commentator at Fox News. “I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But when the projected ratings came in, I said to myself, ‘You’ll still have your journalistic integrity as long as you can pretend that nothing unusual is happening. The viewers won’t know the difference, because they’re just zoning out in front of the TV.’

“At first it was strange. I was sitting naked on set behind the desk, the cameramen leering at me and millions of people no doubt staring at my breasts on their television screens. But I reminded myself that I’m an insider, a power elite who’s making millions of dollars a year, and the schlubs sitting on their couches probably don’t even know our planet’s been conquered by an alien power; they live in their little bubble worlds on Facebook and as with the rest of the news, they’ll forget everything they’ve seen and heard minutes after they’ve turned off their TV. So I gutted it out.”

“Megyn Sally has fine knockers,” averred Joe Nobody, a Fox News viewer, “but I’ve seen better on Pornhub.”

When Tromp did consent to be interviewed on CNN, he sat across from stark naked Brianna Keeley and slid his frog-like tongue down her throat, forcing her to improvise.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is most unfortunate,’” said Keeley. “Here’s this tremendous opportunity to interview our alien master, to find out what makes him tick. I mean, what are his plans for us? Will he slaughter half our population or perhaps exterminate us in toto? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

“I’d assumed Tromp might try to use to his advantage the fact that he could decree that I be constantly naked in his presence. But it hadn’t occurred to me he might jam his slimy, two feet long reptilian tongue down my throat and just keep it there for the duration of the interview. My challenge then was to pose my carefully-crafted questions to Tromp without them sounding all garbled.

“At first, I just choked and vomited in my mouth, because I could feel his revolting tongue slithering down my throat. Then it occurred to me that while Tromp’s three hands were occupied with my breasts and other private parts, he’d neglected to control my wrists. So I began furiously writing down my questions with a thick black marker, and I held the paper up to Tromp’s bloated face. I watched as his eyeballs turned to look at my questions, and you know what? He released one of my breasts and scribbled his answers in the space I’d provided him. So it was question and answer, and normality was restored.”  

Sunday, November 13, 2016

The Ogre-Clown of Trumpland

Liberals stayed home on voting day;
Smug and well off, they took no stand,
Sailing by the castaway
To the far-away isle of Trumpland

Suits and pollsters of the chattering class
Stared into their cracked old crystal ball,
Gave their new Gilded Age a pass,
Hid their rotting nation beneath a pall

Lady Liberty cast her shadow:
Crawling out from its depths the trolls
Stormed the stage of the TV show,
Roaring over the din of polls

March up and down the streets if you like,
Stick your pinkie in the breach in the dike,
Sell your soul or you’ll surely drown
In the sewer of the Ogre Clown

Were the god we deserve to show himself at last, would we shed tears of joy or claw out our eyes to spare us from having to see our essence made manifest? How many people truly know themselves and understand that our high-tech wonderland is a veneer over a wilderness that’s the source of all our nightmares? When the lights go out and our savage neighbours throw off their ill-fitting trappings of civility, storm the battlements, and conjure their ogre king, the duped, happy-talking professionals of the establishment are shocked and appalled. “America is divided,” they say. “A civil war is coming.” But they don’t understand, because they don’t accept the barbarity spread out before them as their shadow. Only outcasts who don’t prop up the American system could be blameless for the coming of America’s best representative, for the ogre Donald Trump. They’ve played no part in turning the United States into a laughingstock which every nation is at its core for being a herd of beasts and sheep that pretend to be angels. American liberals think they’re innocent because they protect gays and Muslims and women’s choice to abort their fetuses. Meanwhile, these same liberal professionals pass their time as worker bees and consumers in a new Gilded Age and preside over the US-led destruction of the biosphere.

For comedians and philosophers, the 2016 US presidential election is an intellectual feast. Trump captured the dreaded zeitgeist of American decline and humiliated the neoliberal establishment. Contrary to Trump’s clumsy epithet for her, Hillary Clinton wasn’t especially crooked; instead, she was clueless—like the entire class of power elites, the pundits and pollsters and politicians, and the complacent beta herds of doctors, lawyers, and teachers who think they’re on the right side of history whereas the horde of Trumpian savages is un-American. Not even Sherlock Holmes could show Democrats the clues that hide in plain sight. Bernie Sanders tried and was marginalized as a “socialist” and a misanthropic dreamer. Democrats have been too busy fussing as technocratic custodians of the social systems to realize that America is a myth. Their true home has been Trump’s sewer all along—only, some have been wailing and drudging naked through the filth because they couldn’t afford blinders and boots, while the professionals, whom Thomas Frank showed have made up the base of the Democratic Party for decades, mistook the spectacle of infantilized and shell-shocked consumers, scurrying in their corner of the global village, for a land of the free and a home of the brave.  

How smug were the writers of the Saturday Night Live sketches which depicted Trump as a troll and Clinton as a shoe-in for the presidency and “the most qualified candidate ever to run for high office”! The latter mantra was a euphemism for “competent technocrat,” for “manager of the system and maintainer of the status quo,” whereas the right-wing backlashes in Europe, the Sanders campaign and the nomination of Trump signaled that the millions who have been left behind by the system have finally insisted on searching for alternatives. A neoliberal can afford to say that masses of have-knots can be expected in a free market, if that neoliberal happens to be part of the establishment. If he himself is a loser in conventional terms, he wouldn’t be thankful for the second coming of Clinton, because he’d have been radicalized by years of resentfully watching the glitzy American success stories on TV. He’d be desperate enough to want to tear down the whole system and to take revenge on the top one percent of power elites who have flourished almost beyond comprehension while the majority’s wages in the US have been stagnant for decades. Trump exploited this blowback from globalism, using his skills as a reality TV star to demagogue his way to victory, to inflict the world with the fallout of his megalomania.

Even now after the scales have fallen from their eyes, American liberals rally to oppose Republicans who now control all branches of their government. They don’t understand that these armies of Republican troglodytes are only symptoms of a deeper, more persistent inhumanity. As Yuval Harari points out in Homo Deus, the rancor of First World blue collar workers who have lost their jobs to Third World slaves is destined to be followed by the bewilderment of white collar elites who will in turn lose their jobs to computers. As robots and slaves of authoritarian states are replacing middle-class labourers, computers will occupy upper-class positions in the knowledge economy; that’s the logic of “free market” capitalism. We “liberate” inhuman natural forces from the creativity we’re capable of imposing when we act in a dignified, transcendent fashion, and when we recognize we’re all at war with a godless universe and must create a virtually supernatural world that doesn’t run on such heartless evolutionary principles; otherwise, we suffer and die as hapless quasi-animals. Just as Obama is leading the transition team that’s ushering in the Trump regime to the White House, which regime will be dedicated to erasing any sign that the abomination of a neoliberal African-American once sat in the Oval Office, we’re all programming the machines that will replace our whole species of deluded primates.