#26. The Greatest Show on Earth!
Nothing is so spectacular as a US election.
The Spectacle
As an outsider looking in, it’s hard to not view the US Presidential Election as the ultimate theater. The election is this grand stage and the politicians do an exquisite job as performers, reading the script like the seasoned pros they are. It’s almost Shakespearean in its drama with heroes, villains, betrayals, and alliances. Of course, all of them are heroes and all of them are villains, depending which party you choose to side with. Truly Schrodingers politician.
You see that is the Shyamalan twist! Depending on where you’re sitting in the auditorium, the hero becomes the villain, and the villain becomes the hero. It’s subjective theater. The perfect drama! *Insert Chef’s Kiss*
These pros have mastered the art of spectacle. Some are better than others, Lindsay Graham comes to mind. They truly make you feel…emotive, for want of a cleaner word.
Every debate, every rally, every tweet is carefully crafted and professionally designed to keep you engaged. It's reality TV dressed up as governance. This is why Trump is very good at it.
These performer have us glued to our screens and thanks to the prevlaence of social media (Substack included) in politics, never in the history of our existence have we been more subjected to professional theatre like this.
And we love it!
We lap it up, casting judgment on each "act" while thinking we’re participating in something meaningful. But what’s really happening? Is anything really changing?!
Our Actors
Let’s look at the cast. They’ve been rehearsing for years, expertly trained in public speaking, body language, sound bites. The media, in what is surely their most profitable years, adds that extra pazzazz to their reporting, finding ever more creative (and somewhat unethical) ways to direct attention their way.
For our 2024 production, the ensemble has been updated with new performers, billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, who havebeen firmly planted in the red and blue corners, ready to convince the audience which billiona…I mean party is better.
The actors step onto the stage, pretending to be different from the others, but at their core, they’re all playing the same role: “The Savior." Whether they’re wearing the suit of the establishment or the costume of the outsider, they promise salvation.
“Make America Great Again”
“We won't go back”
Promises of “salvation”. They never deliver. In my lifetime Obama was the best “Savior” we've been promised and what did we get? A decade of wars, Gitmo still open, expanded NSA, more drones and bombs dropped than any other President and rather ironically, the return of African slavery thanks to the coup in Libya.
But anyway, we'retalking about the show so let’s get to the writers. The scripts they churn out are written in poll-tested phrases. “We the people,” “fighting for you,” “change you can believe in”, but it's the same recycled rhetoric, designed to stoke your emotions as a biased viewer. In reality, you’re not even the audience anymore. You're the mark.
The Price of Admission - Attention as Currency
This is where it gets very sad.
Your time and attention. That’s the currency in this show. It is the ultimate engagement farming operation.
Social media is the go-to bait, the campaign rallies are the hook, and before you know it, you're genuinely emotionally attached and sucked into a vortex of tribalism, misinformation, and outrage - sometimes even faux- because you know, you're part of the show too. You have to play your part.
We are living in exciting times but the “attention era” is hands down the most depressing aspect in modern life. Every sound bite, every scandal, every gaffe is designed to keep you emotionally invested. And it’s all tailored. None of it is real. Every clip is manufactured to get YOU engaged. They don’t care about your values, your concerns, or your needs. Behind the candidates are a mega team of experts in psychology, writing, legal affairs, media, PR etc…They care about your clicks, your shares, your votes. They’re doing their perfectly choregraphed musical number while we’re stuck in the cheap seats, arguing over who had the best dance routine.
Meanwhile, the real players are offstage, financing the show.
The Illusionists
And this brings us to the crux of it all. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. Oh wait, this is where you tell me that this is the most consequential election of our time right? Like we’ve never heard that before!
Reality: whether you’re red or blue, liberal or conservative, they’ve got you. Harris will not be leading the US. Neither will Trump. The same way that Biden isn’t right this minute.
The brokers present you with two options. In this case they even went as far as replacing one of the two options without a vote. That’s how much your vote matters!
Both options are of course painted as life-or-death decisions but at the end of the day, you’re voting for different shades of the same system. The system that keeps the same power structures intact.
US national debt is over $35,000,000,000,000 (TRILLION)
Debt to GDP is 124%
Interest expense on the debt is 3.5% of GDP!!! It’s the highest expense on the US balance sheet. The economy grows at most 2%-3% in a good year. ←Do the math here.
These are the real problems that effect everything that happens every single day but most Americans have no idea about it.
And you know what, while we’re taking the position of the viewer. Take a look around you. What’s really changed in the last 20 years? We’ve had different presidents, different Congresses, but the problems remain. The economy is still skewed towards the top one percent, in fact it’s probably more toward the 0.5% nowadays. The political machine still pushes for ever more division and your taxes barely create any decent public services. If anything public services have worsened over time.
Alas, those real world tangible things dknt matter. The show must go on, and we’re stuck watching the same predictable plotlines play out.
Le Finale
The greatest trick the politicians ever pulled was convincing us that we’re powerless without them. But the truth? We’re only powerless if we keep playing their game. If we keep buying the overprices tickets to the show.
The way to take control is to disengage from the spectacle. Stop giving them your time, your emotional investment. The show only works because we feed it and they know it. The metrics they have thanks to social media platforms are beyond our imagination. They know how we will react to their content better than we know ourselves. We are no longer the audience, we are the extras. We are the show.
Welcome to The Greatest Show on Earth. It runs until mid-November.
Enjoy the show ladies and gents.