Election Game: Is It Rigged?
Don’t know how it is with most people who read The Advance News Journal, but for me, I have friends who hate Donald Trump, and I have friends who hate President Joe Biden. These days, there are few people who are lukewarm when it comes to state and national politics, Biden and Trump.
Being a free thinker with half a brain, I can find things I like about both parties, the GOP and the Dems, and things they both do that drive me crazy.
Love or hate, that’s present-day America.
If we could take the best that each party has to offer, that would be great, but it never works that way.
At the end of the day, does anything ever really change with regard to the shape of the country, other than the national debt growing worse with each administration?
Over the past 60 years, nearly every U.S. president has dug us deeper into debt, with Trump, Obama, and W. running the largest U.S. budget deficits in history. (Source: Investopedia.com.) Biden’s on track to tie them.
As of June 2024, the U.S. national debt stood at $34.63 trillion. (Same source.)
A Country Divided
These days, most of us would probably agree that we’ve never seen the country as divided as it is now. Whereas before, Republicans and Democrats, most of them, could sit down, break bread, and share a laugh. Now, they want to throw the bread at each other, aiming for the head.
When you have a guy like NBA great Charles Barkley saying he’d punch any Black person he saw wearing a T-shirt with Trump’s face on it, you know something is seriously amiss in our modern culture.
Now, after Saturday’s attempted assassination, he’s walking back his statement.
Talk radio didn’t help Americans’ sense of neighborly love when it really came on the scene in the 1980s with the appearance of Rush Limbaugh.
When Fox News launched in 1996, CNN had some real competition, and the respective talking heads started lobbing grenades at one another.
More division, which segued into real hate when Trump came on the scene in 2016.
Social media came to fruition in the mid- to late-2000s, and finally, the average person on the street, steeped in politics, finally had their own platform, comments section, to start their own war of words, if you will, calling each other names, down and dirty, threatening life and limb.
Since then, America has grown more divisive, with each of the two major political parties, or the voters who support them, blaming the other for the problems facing the country.
Still, in years past, the country was nowhere near like it is today — divided to the point of visceral hate for one another.
Which got me thinking, are we all being “played?” Is it true what others have said in the past, even though they’ve been largely dismissed as flakes, conspiracy theorists, which is — the real people who control America stay hidden in the background, growing richer while the country digs itself deeper into debt?
They “play” us by giving us only two political parties from which to choose candidates at the state and national levels, even though nothing ever really changes, no matter who gets elected?
Not to pick on Trump, but he was the guy who was supposedly removed from the deep state, an outside maverick who would change D.C. and “drain the swamp.”
Yet, what did he do almost immediately after winning the presidency in 2016?
Brought in the same swamp critters who have been infesting this nation’s capital for years, like John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, et al.
Joe Biden did the same thing. The same old, same old.
Presidents come and go, but the D.C. rat infestation remains locked in place.
People who couldn’t run a lemonade stand elected to positions of power, and since term limits don’t exist, they make a career out of politics, leaving office, always, far richer than when they were first elected.
George Carlin
Before he died in 2008, George Carlin was still doing standup comedy, only he was stuck on making observations about present-day America and the shape we’re in.
One of his best routines can still be found on YouTube, which is called “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
It speaks to the Deep State, the people who really run this country behind the curtain, and it explains in comedic fashion why nothing ever changes, no matter who gets elected.
Carlin’s routine, part of it, goes like this:
“I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, they got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”
This was, of course, before the big advent of social media, but still, compared to big media, the people on the socials have a relatively small platform.
More from George Carlin:
“They got you by the (expletive). They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking.”
Which is why school testing exists. Companies like Pearson make billions off the standardized tests, but the kids don’t graduate any smarter. In fact, I’d argue that the tests do more harm than good to the educational process. They certainly stress out teachers, students, and parents.
Back to George:
“They’re not interested in that (critical thinking). That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting (expletive) by a system that threw them overboard 30 (expletive) years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly (expletive) jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money.”
We miss you, George.
“They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this (expletive) place.”
Here comes my favorite part of his routine, which hits the nail on the head:
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people — white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on — good honest hard-working people continue — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these rich (expletive) who don’t give a (expletive) about them. They don’t give a (expletive) about you. They don't care about you at all — at all — at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.”
Some of us care, George, but like you said, we’re not part of the big club, and the political game is rigged. Two parties, opposite sides of the same tarnished coin.
Carlin ends his routine with this gem of truth:
“That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue (expletive) that’s being jammed up their (expletive) every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
So well put, and it’s why, in the end, no matter which party wins the election, nothing of real substance ever changes. Okay, there is one thing that changes. Every year, with every administration, this country sinks deeper into debt.
RIP, George. We miss your running commentary of American politics.