Rumble, Young Man, Rumble

As I was out at the mall buying replacement shirts for work,* I forgot to watch the beginning of the debates last night. I did see the end, where Mitt Romney was in full Rock 'Em-Sock 'Em Automaton mode, affecting an incredible simulation of human thought and action. I can't imagine the software upgrade process could have been pretty. The hard-drive defragmentation alone must have taken a week.

I surfed around the interwebs for a while and even braved the quaint and rustic byways of cable news for a bit. Cable news is now like this place we have in California called Solvang, a little town designed to look and feel like a 19th century Danish village if 19th century Danish villages had a Coffee Bean and an As Seen On TV store. It's an ossified, sclerotic pre-fossil, a corporatized shell of not only what it was but what it was supposed to have been, left only to remind us of something none of us need ever be nostalgic for in the first place. Rachel Maddow is great and all, but how well served is she by presiding over the delivery of information that was old when Jim Lehrer still just had enough skin on his head for one face?

Somehow live television can't quite match the immediacy of social media, which sounds odd, but the mediation of the message--the passing through the cheesecloth of the camera--automatically strains out the little bits that both hold all the flavor and may poison you with salmonella. Television isn't twitter. It knows it isn't twitter. And it can only try to bridge the gap between the alienating-yet-necessary cultural limp of "production" by amping up the volume of the message. The result is you get Chris Matthews losing his fucking mind because the first of three debates didn't meet his criteria for stagecraft or Shakespearean drama. For that level of insane vitriol, I'm certain the only thing that would have satisfied him (and the rest of the left-leaning Blood Chorus humming ominously along) would have been for the president to beat Mitt Romney to death with Paul Ryan's spine. Which, I will admit I too would have preferred to see, but not so much because of my disappointment with the performance but because Spartacus is off the air and, well, you just develop a taste for things.

I saw a goodly portion of it, enough to be disappointed, sure, but also more than enough to actually be amused at the ability of Mitt Romney to deploy outright lies and total policy reversals as little tactical nuclear weapons to both blast at his opponent and cover his tracks in the process. Barack Obama came out to debate Mitt Romney and found himself squaring off against some sort of weird hybrid of George Wallace and Ted Kennedy. What the fuck do you do with that?

You say the lines you rehearsed, you roll up your tent and you start making your way toward the next stop on the carny trail, that's what you do. If this were 2004, I'd be sunk in a pit of cold sick after this, praying for the mercy of drowning in it if only to feel something besides despair. I don't know if it's that I've grown into some perspective in the last eight years or I've simply learned to give less of a shit, but this really doesn't feel like the end of the world, as I've been told--usually at high volume and with excellent lighting--I must. Mostly it just feels like I'm my grandmother trying to figure out Led Zeppelin. I'm not really sure what it is, but I know enough to be scared of it a little and my ears are ringing.



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*You'd be surprised at how many I go through in a workday. Sure, they're the tearaway kind with the velcro side panels, but you get that many women together in a group, add alcohol and gyrate a little to something by Chic and no seam is safe.