This past weekend’s closed debate between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown fueled the fury of rallying students. But the electorate and media do not acknowledge that they play an integral part in perpetuating this empty, superficial political side-show.
The logistical secrecy of this non-public event, along with prohibition of news coverage outside of The Fresno Bee, which co-sponsored the event, seems to be antithetical to practices of a healthy democracy. There is something to be said for “you get what you tolerate,” but rallying citizens, many wearing their partisan gear, are playing a mug’s game. I would argue that vocal testaments of antipathy for these kind of vacuous political forums would be suggestive of a discerning electorate rather than a reactionary one.
Political debates are nothing more than trite, contrived, theatrical displays guised as an invaluable method of informing the public. Considering the process by which this debate was organized, it should have been clear this was never intended to be an informative debate, but rather a ploy to win points with the millions of Hispanic voters (more specifically, the English-illiterate kind) that are concentrated in the valley and the state at large.
Leading news organizations and its editors feel perfectly comfortable identifying Meg Whitman’s employee’s legal status as front-page news in part because we care about this. We use trivial information like this to conclude who is fit to govern the state, rather than discuss why it is that this democracy seems to spew out the same homogenous political candidates year after year, whose legitimacy and access to the ballot is often based on either accumulated wealth (e.g., Whitman) or family ties (e.g., Brown). The electorate is too busy muddling over The Fresno Bee’s glamorization of this political side-show to acknowledge that so long as the best private fund-raisers gain access to the ballot, we will continue to have a choice between two insincere and soulless candidates.
The electorate is befuddled as to why candidates don’t talk about the “issues,” when it should be apparent that this is never their intention, and because they often have no clue. And if they do, they are too politically naïve to formulate a comprehensive implementation of such ideals because it requires navigating through the wilderness of the American political system that is built to maintain an insurmountable aversion to any fundamental and tangible change.
Republican leadership doesn’t necessarily care that Whitman is uninformed, just as Democratic leadership doesn’t particularly care about Brown’s unfavorable record in politics, because these candidates are ultimately the tools and talking heads of a much larger, more concentrated political ideology and political system, called the “invisible government” by some, that is immune to the currents of elections, and happily allows politicians to absorb public discontent.
This is why we can be appalled at the high unemployment rates without recognizing that unemployment, poverty and low wages are intrinsic to the economic system we claim is fundamental to the character of this nation. Even during the Clinton-era that held the lowest unemployment rate (four percent) in 30 years, this still left millions of willing workers without a means to earn a living.
It is not the media’s responsibility to fuel and instigate political or social revolutions, but to describe the systemic conditions that perpetuate such unpalatable political, social and economic conditions most certainly is. As demonstrated in Saturday’s pseudo-event, The Fresno Bee’s editors, along with the current culture of U.S. media and its journalistic priorities, are in no hurry to end their complicit relations with a defunct political process and an inept electorate, and thus are no small problem for this drowning democracy.
The debate was useless indeed, but the American people get the government they deserve, by and large. And so long as we want to focus our attention on vacuous political forums like the one many regrettably witnessed on Saturday, the hope of an astute democracy dies, letting the race toward insanity continue.
