What I'd like to hear a reporter - if there are any left in America - it's near impossible to listen to a presidential presser, the soft, meandering, tactically inept questions that get lobbed up there by these besotted trolls leave one gasping with pained disbelief - what I'd like one of the quacks to ask Obama is, seeing as how he spent so much time blaming the economic crisis on incompetent, greedy CEOs, ask him what he says to the guy running Ford, a CEO who by and large did everything right, brought strong management to the company, cleaned up the books, did so well that despite the huge drop in sales has not had to go to the government with cap in hand begging for money, ask Obama what he says to this guy now that he's just bailed out his biggest domestic competitor, bailed out and will now be suckling with billions of dollars for god knows how long the guys who did everything wrong? Ask him if America is now the country where winners lose and losers get to pretend they've won?
Of course that will never happen - power is a very seductive thing and democracy the incantation we ignorant, liberated beasts whisper to each other in the dark to stave off loneliness. Some part of us wants to be governed by magic, favoured by the august unseen spirits as if we've been welcomed into a sanctuary, it silently drives us like some vestige of a herding mentality, a need to be led by a force we perceive as greater than ourselves, that cannot be filtered out of the collective psyche of the species.
Possibly a necessary ignorance, who knows. Certainly advertising, indeed maybe capitalism itself could not thrive without it. I wonder if that's what Mad Men is all about.
