Notes From The Record Room: Election Day Keyboard Runoff…

To whom it may interest,

I think it’s naive to believe that the steady diet of sloganeering, bumpersticker wisdom and politically-fueled meme drops we’ve acclimated to over the last year or so will somehow be miraculously finished after today, our day of voting in the national presidential election. There will be no celebrated week of social media withdrawal, no involuntary shakes as the constancy of curated news clips we’ve voluntarily treated our eyes and ears to diminishes. Our minds will continue to be spat upon as clicks and likes are requested, the talking heads on the other side of our screens claiming to have the clip wherein a side is “OWNED” and our collective need for validation is temporarily sated. Can we admit that we’re maybe not as smart as we think we are? There was a point in time when experts had earned these platforms, when necessary credentials were required to take up space on our television screens or our radio airwaves, thusly winning our attention. Credentials like, I don’t know, a fucking education?

We’re all platformed now. It’s been this way for decades and consequently we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that we know enough to steer discourse and bless others with our profound understanding of the inner workings or government, law, taxes, and economics and how these things inform social stability and class structure. People who couldn’t graduate high school have been awarded expert status on all of the aforementioned fields of study thanks to Google and the proliferation of propaganda websites masquerading as viable sources of fact-checked information. And this rant isn’t meant to discount shared experiences and how firsthand witness to true “boots on the ground” public reality very often helps public discourse gain attention—the work of Malala Yousafzai immediately springs to mind as someone who had to work outside the media to inform the public of abuse of power and systemic oppression—so I’m not opposed to underground media. But I do think it’s worth noting that underground media and conspiracy-theorist commentators don’t share the same goal, as the former’s motive is to remove corporate lucre from influencing the tone of the news we consume, while the other wishes to generate dissent for dollars and build media empires off of the backs of the disenfranchised. It’s evangelism, loud opportunists who’ve built their mansions on foundations of crinkled, hard-earned dollars wrested from the hands of people who hope that their frustration and anger can someday be relieved. Again, we’re all platformed, so any one of us can attempt to become a figurehead for bullshit.

I’m aware that I’m writing this as someone whose privilege to spread these opinions is solely granted by my ability to pay for a WiFi connection and NOT a top-to-bottom understanding of how we feel as a nation. But, I type my thoughts not in an effort to tell people how they should vote or what they should believe, but to question the legitimacy of people whose entire careers are built stoking division and fear. They might tell us exactly what we want to hear—I’m as susceptible to this need for occasional validation as anyone—but they do so in an effort to fill our heads with enough noise that our capacity for thinking about what’s being said becomes tiring and pointless. Obviousness becomes damn near unseeable, literacy and comprehension too taxing to employ. And, then, we find ourselves on Election Day, meant to fill in our little bubbles with a Sharpie as informed citizens when we’re all just a bunch of rattled and exhausted people, some of whom have more to lose than others depending on how this contest plays out.

As I play for the umpteenth time the song “Moral Majority” by Dead Kennedys, itself an indictment of the hate culture spread in the 1980s by so-called paragons of right-minded and theologically bolstered principles, I lament its relevancy. How does a song recorded 43 years ago still have ties to now? And, then I hear Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On; and Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back; and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”… etc., etc. So many albums and songs from the past were written with the hope that the topics of the day would eventually become topics of the past, and it’s like they were issued yesterday.

For me, this is confirmation that someone benefits from keeping our living climate turbulent, and it isn’t us. It never is.

Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead

P.S. AI will remove more American jobs than undocumented immigrants ever have or will, so I hope that a faceless technology garners the same vehement rage that a segment of our population does. Be consistent.