Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

The “This is my 1,400th Post” Edition.

Yay!

Part 1 of 2

Ok, this day started off weird and stayed off-center for one reason: Fox News.

Usually, I have the Castle wenches (and, to be clear, these are good, union wenches from Wenches, Jesters and Eunuchs Local # 89. I won’t have scab wenches in the Castle. Anyway…) haul me out of bed – shrieking like a baby girl cobra being deposed by the Senior Partner at Mongoose, Mongoose and Weehacker – fill me with mead and cookies and then strap me into the Clockwork Orange Eye Thingie to watch the horror.

Except today I thought maybe the wenches had blown it.

They hadn’t, of course, (always hire quality) but as I was slotted into Sunday Morning Coming Down position I noticed that Fox News was…winding down.

Which was…fine – A terrible plague perhaps? Going out of business? -- except it threw all my clocks off.

Because the Fox freak show at the Mouse Circus starts at 9:00. The “Fear and Balanced” surrogates then administer soothing eucalyptus prostate massages and cheese flights to Conservatives and tire-iron beatings to Liberals (“Liberal” being “Anyone to the Left of the Sheriff of Nottingham”) for the first 30 minutes.

After which the Wingnut Ignoscenti huddle up to declare Iraq Beautiful, Duyba Wise and Juan Williams a Pussy for another 30 minutes, as the rest of the Circus comes online.

But today they were powering down while my clocks were all saying that it was some many number of minutes before 9:00. (Well, not every clock. One, for purely sentimental reasons, always says it's 8:05. I have two watches that tell me it’s 7:13 and 3:22 respectively. And a pair of pants that swears it’s 1982.)

And then they launched into what I can only describe as the creepiest, most baffling half-hour Fox Lysenko “Journalism” I have seen since they dispatched anchors to the deserts of Iraq to jam microphones into the faces of soldier about to roll into Dubya’s Operation Endless Clusterfuck and have them scream “Fox Rocks!” at the tops of their voices.

Lysenko?

Lysenkoism (Emphasis added)

Lysenkoism refers to an episode in Russian science featuring a non-scientific peasant plant-breeder named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko [1898-1976]. Lysenko was the leading proponent of Michurianism during the Lenin/Stalin years. I. V. Michurin, in turn, was a proponent of Lamarckism...

According to Lamarck, evolution occurs because organisms can inherit traits which have been acquired by their ancestors...

Lamarckism is favored by those who see will as the primary driving force of life...

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology.

The scripted, stilted mess I saw on teevee could not have been more fraudulently and painful awkward had it been performed by a terrified nine-year-old being force-fed lines by Roger Ailes, as he stood just off-camera with a knife to the throat of her puppy.

The Fox News Labs took a band-saw to Presidential politics, lopped off a few of its limbs, bolted 'em to their Big!Shiny!Loud! game-day Sooperbowl coverage, ran a million volts through this grisly thing they made, then put in on-camera and let it twitch while perky-titted young ladies preened around it.

It was…very ugly news-porn, but not random. Not at all.

It was as ideologically-driven as Lysenkoism, because to Ailes, Fox, and the fascist Right, it’s all just One Big Game.

Somewhere in the burn bags and shredders in the basement of Roger Ailes Fox Bunker are the tattered remains of a memo that says something to the effect that:

“Politics is a Game.
The Super Bowl is a Game.
Issues are for idiots.
Jam them the fuck together and Sell!Sell!Sell! or I’ll feed your family to the wolverines.”

Because it's all a game to them.

All just a fucking game.

Which is why they can justify putting their stable of Iraqi Catastrophe midwives on the air week after week after bloody week as if they weren’t monsters.

How they can smile and glitter and groom each other like chimps and happytalk while right behind them their paymasters eviscerate the Constitution and drain away everything that makes America worthwhile.

Because none of this will ever touch them.

Not one breath of breeze from the whirlwind they created will ever muss up Brit Hume’s bulletproof toupee.

Not one spatter of the slaughter he helped instigate will ever smudge Bill Kristol’s gleaming white cuffs.

That is the arrangement they share with their degenerate audience; that the Pig People will be given a ringside seat to the smashing of democracy in America, the unleashing of hell on Earth, soft core porn, and the Superbowl, because at Fox and in the hearts and minds of the Great Wad they all the same.

All one zoomy, smashcut, graphics-and-bass-heavy, undifferentiated, torch-lit orgasm.

All just a fucking game, and safe inside the dank, teevee-limned womb of Mommy’s basement, the cowards and christopaths of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists will never, ever, ever have to pay any price whatsoever for the giant shit their President is taking on the Earth in their name.

So on Fox News, Shephard Smith (Who?) purees SooperBowl jargon and Presidential Politics, because WTF, it is all a game.

All about My Team Winning, regardless of whether or not My Team is wrong, or evil or ruining the country.

And then the Pretty People Anchor – Meagan Somebody and a nameless, beveled haircut -- (backed up by Graying Old Credible Guy Steve Krafft reporting LIVE from a deserted street in The Big City) talk Sooper Tuesday and Sooper Bowl interchangeable and cut to the Working Press out in the field to bring you important stuff Live!Live!Live.

And what exactly do they cut to that is so terribly important?

Harry Martin is in Chappaqua, because nothing says “relevant political discourse” like an unknown nobody on a completely empty street in a town where the Clinton's live two months out of the year interviewing no one about nothing.

I swear, it was like Charlton Heston had paused during the third reel of “The Omega Man”

to report on…nothing…to empty air.

The back to the studio so the Haircut can reminds us (in case we’d forgotten in the intervening seconds) that like, football, politics is…like…all about strategy.

Then on to Perky Kirsten Powers – Manufactured “Democratic” strategist -- and Margaret Hoover – Manufactured “Republican” strategist – who tell us that “Hillary has absolutely 100% name recognition.”

Margaret: Obama is owning the Hope Rhetoric and we have to take that back from him.

And all I want to know -- fierce little tits or not -- is: Who. The. Fuck. Are. These. Children?

It’s about the future of the World, one of then declaims firmly.

Next, Christ Wallace will host a special about stuff that Roger Ailes thinks is important…and then Cool Sooper Bowl Commercials!

Then on to Joe Battenfeld in Boston…on -- I am not kidding -- another utterly empty street, in front of a building that Romney might have been in at one time. And Joe tells us that McCain will be here at a pre-SuperBowl Party later.

Also there is some worry that people will have some trouble getting to the polls…

And, you ask, why would a game on Sunday interfere with voting on Tuesday?

Well we have no time for questions like that. Or questions of any kind. Or compound sentences. Or adverbs.

Because we are off to watch Jack Conaty stand on– I am still not kidding -- an utterly empty street/bridge in Chicago (Looks like Dearborn, where it crosses the river) talking about the fact that he is near where Obama…

…may be coming…

…in a few days.

Then wheeeee! We’re off to Little Rock and Scott Sayers standing in front of – still not kidding -- the vacant state house, on an empty street, talking about the fact that Mike Huckabee used to be in that very building when he was governor.

And then -- Zap!Pow! –- we rocket off to some fucking graphic narrated by Chris Wallace of two helmets banging each other and him stringing the terms “ playing field”, ”game plan” and “action in Arizona” together in a final, frenzied blurring of any distinction between a massively over-hyped, meaningless contest between hyperthyroid millionaires…and the electoral process of our gravely wounded democracy at the end of arguably the most disastrous Administration in American history.

Ahead we are promised Political Ads that could Change The Race…and Super Bowl ads.

And I sit back, bathed in the transparently artificial and obviously compulsory friskiness that the Fox Trollops are being told to Push!Push!Push as the special of the day, and feel physically ill.

Ill at the parallels between the physically desolate streets on which the Fox non-reporters are loitering and literally talking about nothing in grotesque parody of reportage…

…and the spiritually desolate and degraded place that journalism itself has become; a crack-house where a mansion once stood, stripped of any remnant or pretense of professionalism and replaced by rough, drive-up, curb-side, hand jobs mechanically dispensed by consumptive slatterns with pretty hair and painted smiles.