So it happened. Katy Perry
officially endorsed Hillary Clinton. Not only did she endorse her, she “roared”
for her on stage. Just the day before, the superstar couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed
for the audience of her supporters on another campaign rally, and a week
earlier the Bronx-born Hispanic singer and actress Jennifer Lopez – or rather
her agents who must have received a pretty decent commission for making it
happen in such a flashy manner – invited her to the concert she held in Miami. The
gleeful bunch of multi-platinum selling artists joined the immense ranks of Team
– or rather – Band Hillary alongside other singers, like Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga,
Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Jon Bon Jovi and Adele, or actors, namely, Anne
Hathaway, Jessica Biel, Richard Gere, Salma Hayek and George Clooney. If that
is not enough, I couldn’t possibly forget to mention the most glamorous family
of the United States – the Kardashians.
Trump’s constellation, on the
other hand, wasn’t as impressive with Tila Tequila, Kid Rock, Jon Voight, Stephen
Baldwin, Mike Tyson, Dennis Rodman, Hulk Hogan, the forgotten former teenage
star Aaron Carter or Clint Eastwood in the line-up. The latter squad seemed somehow bleak if you compared the number of their Instagram followers with the
former, so it’s pretty obvious that Trump’s campaign organizers did not exert themselves in celebrity hunting.
Toothpaste Commercial
A pioneer of modern linguistics and one of the
most renowned American dissidents, Noam Chomsky, once compared the elections to
selling toothpaste. In both election campaigns and toothpaste commercials the information
is irrelevant, what matters is to lure you into buying the product by using
deceptive techniques. The 2016 US presidential campaign is no different, one
may even say it’s one the worst adverts they’ve seen in years.
Product A
Mrs. Clinton’s maneuver to surround herself
with famous faces, especially just days before the election, was, in my view,
the most honest and circumspect move of her whole campaign. Cuddling celebs at
concerts will always make positive headlines, raising funds at their banquets
will never be controversial, and exchanging favorable Tweets can only be seen
as “cute.” Therefore, one may ask, why didn’t Hillary and her campaign stick to
the positive side of publicity, why didn’t she just show America and the world
how virtuous and – quoting Adele – “amazing” she is? At the same time, it
rather wouldn’t hurt if she presented her ideas on how to fix the problems the
US is experiencing and gave concrete examples of policies she would introduce.
Instead, she chose the path of anti-Trumpism
and anti-Putinism – nay, she even merged those two into one, serving the
American public, and actually the whole world with one of the most absurd geopolitical
statements a serious politician can make: Russia with its leader Vladimir Putin
used methods of cyber warfare to affect the US election, in order to ensure
Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton becomes the next POTUS.
In a normal world where the media would
actually provide citizens with information, some highly regarded reporter would
brand such a revelation as a lunacy and completely discredit the author. But,
because we live in a parallel Matrix-like world where the media provide the
populace with a particular agenda, major news outlets raced among themselves to
publish the most inventive tale of Trump-Russia connection. They quoted “intelligence
experts” who were convinced that Russia was meddling in the US election, though
couldn’t provide any proof for it. We had Clinton’s national spokesman Josh
Schwerin tweeting that Kremlin-sponsored RT announced via Twitter the newest
release of Hillary’s campaign chair John Podesta’s leaked e-mails before
WikiLeaks themselves – in his eyes, clear proof that Assange was just another
Russian spy – which was simply idiotic, as WikiLeaks had published it on their
website earlier, RT was simply quicker to tweet the news. It would seem that
the biggest proof of Trump’s association with Russian state was his interview
with the CNN veteran Larry King, which aired on RT. Following that logic, Larry
King should have already been convicted of espionage.
Ironically, very few journalists dared to bring
up the case of Uranium One deal – a very opaque contract that resulted in Russia
gaining control of about 20 percent of US uranium, all through a series
of transactions done via the Clinton Foundation while Mrs. Clinton was the US
Secretary of State. But why dig into that, we’ve got Trump on RT – that’s a lot
easier to cover!
Product B
Mr. Trump, on the contrary, selected a slightly
different, I would say, less sophisticated course. He just talked. Pretty much about everything.
It didn’t matter if he made sense or not, whether he got the facts right, the
speeches that could be seen on the news looked like genuine - self-written, or
even not written at all - opinions on a variety of hot topics, obviously
including his rival and her ignoble deeds. At first, this tactic may have seemed
chaotic, but it definitely achieved its goal. Trump defeated all the other
Republican candidates before the game even started, and just hours before the
November Election Day, no one can expect what’s going to happen.
Trump is probably everything he is called by
his opponents. I say “probably,” because we don’t really have the indication of
what he is actually up to, mostly because – unlike his competitor – he’s never
held a government function. Not being gullible to believe everything he says, we
can only scrutinize his future cabinet appointments and see who backs his campaign
in order to find the true direction of his prospective policies. By the looks
of it, it’s highly unlikely that he will turn out to be a revolutionary
fighting the establishment, as some of his supporters wish to portray him. Unless
fighting the establishment equals having dinners with Rupert Murdoch.
As to his major manifestos, they’re rather
unimpressive. Let’s just take a look at a few of them:
·
Deporting
immigrants back to their home countries: that would only mean that he would
continue the policy of Barack Obama who so far has deported a record number of
immigrants, larger than any other president in history, even George W. Bush.
·
Building
the wall with Mexico: George W. Bush had a similar idea and started to build a “virtual
wall” back in 2006 – no one actually knows about it, because the SBInet program
was a massive failure, putting $1 billion of taxpayers’ money in the
pockets of Boeing and its 10 subcontractors. There’s already a new, quite
similar project in place, so it’s unlikely that it will be scrapped in favor of
an old-school brick wall.
·
Renegotiating
international trade agreements: all of those deals were signed in order to make
the American corporate elite even richer and more powerful – seeing something
like this from a billionaire would certainly be something memorable. But Trump
says he’s “fighting for the working people,” you may take his word for it.
·
Fighting
“terrorism:” quoting one of the points of his policy from his official website, “Defeat the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism just as we won the Cold War”
– this point is so senseless that the commentary is unnecessary, however, it
does not suggest that Mr. Trump knows too much either about history or
geopolitics.
Generally, the policy points on his official
website are hugely vague and barely precise, therefore, it is not easy to
predict Trump’s future policies. On a positive note, he announced his
willingness to cooperate and find common ground with Russia, which – instead of
being a fear inducing factor as Clinton’s campaign would want it to be – should
be what every American would welcome, as better relations between two nuclear
powers mean lesser risk of a military/nuclear conflict.
Finally, we had Donald Trump’s secretly recorded
confessions about groping women. It was hard to believe that Bill Clinton’s wife could actually go
that route, but you need some red herrings when you get questioned by the FBI
during your presidential campaign. Nothing new there either.
Democracy Prevails
I owe an apology to the world of circus for the
title of the post. A few weeks ago, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey
Circus launched the campaign #TakeBackTheCircus aiming to defend the good name
of the circus by halting its comparisons to the US election. I wholeheartedly
apologize, I could have used a different word, yet “circus” seemed so right.
Although some of us do not realize it to the
full extent, the US presidential election affects most of the nations across the globe. That’s
why it’s so depressing that the American people are ahead of such an appalling
choice. Only if someone could tell them that there are more than two candidates
starting in the election… And that one of them is a woman… And that she didn’t
destroy any countries and wreak havoc across the Middle East… And that she
didn’t support the presidential coup in Honduras and block the minimum wage
increase in Haiti… And that she didn’t vote in favor of the biggest crime
against humanity of the 21st century…
But it’s too late. The third party candidates can take
part in presidential debates if they poll at 15%. That’s the threshold set by the
Commission on Presidential Debates. It used to be lower in the 90s but the
major candidates didn’t really like anyone interfering with their ultra-democratic
two-party system. One could as well qualify for the debate after the election. That’s
astonishingly democratic.
Whoever the Americans choose today, one must
admit that this campaign was unique. We had two major candidates with rock
bottom trust ratings battling each other, insulting each other during debates
and trying to scare the public with one another. Show must go on though, let’s
just hope we are all alive and well when it’s over.
