by ANIS SHIVANI
The SOTU spectacle served its purpose. The warmongers shilling for the liberal establishment were reassured that their figurehead president was strong and vigorous, up to the challenge of fighting wars and demonizing immigrants and supporting genocide. Joe still has it in him to be the standard-bearer of the empire, the sigh of relief went up everywhere in the dinosaur media, he can take the fight to the fascists here and abroad! One wants to ignore this non-event altogether except for the volumes it speaks about the cultural stasis this empire has reached in its last days.
For decades I have fantasized—and I’m sure I’m not the only one to harbor this vision—that the president will reach the podium and tear up his formal speech at whatever occasion he’s supposed to be uttering his bullshit and instead look the people in the eye and give them the reality straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. If such a thing happened, the walls of power, I like to imagine, would crumble and honest speech would be common again. Hollywood directors used to harbor the same illusion in the 1930s, during the dark days of the Depression and in a turbulent world heading to another global war, and perhaps some still do, as in the Coen Brothers’s inciteful Burn After Reading (2008), which updated the absurdities of Wag the Dog (1997), to the context of the 2000s, some years after the coup d’état that took the empire in the violent direction that can only have one conclusion.
But this is reality—or the opposite of it—so let’s deal with it. The main interest in Biden’s events is to be on tenterhooks all the time to see if he will completely wander off the rails and start uttering demented gibberish, which, come to think of it, might not be too different from my reverie of the president setting aside his prepared remarks to tell the people the truth at last. But decrepit Joe began by screaming at full volume (when the meds were apparently at their strongest) about the $60 billion he still wants for Ukraine and connecting it with Trump’s alleged fascism, without naming the evil one but often referring to him only as his “predecessor.”
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