Harvestmen

 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing
 --Macbeth (V, v), Shakespeare

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning: 
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning 
--Not Waving, But Drowning, Stevie Smith 

I'm at the borderline of my faith,
I'm at the hinterland of my devotion
In the frontline of this battle of mine 
--Soldier of Love, Sade

_________________

The apparatchiks are trying to drum up enthusiasm for the upcoming Presidential debates, but it's a hard row to hoe when the energy and interest of the average 99 Percenter hovers between "scant" and "nil".

The majority of us exist in a twilight of absurdity, texting, tweeting and streaming as though we are the center of a never-ending maelstrom of our own making.  We are characters of illusion, delusion and self-deceit.  The War on Terror and our political system feed the simulacrum experience.

Our Peace Prize President oversees the killing of some miserable High Value Targets (HVT's) and we are supposed to feel pumped up, but the effort falls flat, for we know our status; the jig's up.  We are fast losing our status as a democracy, and our economy (for the average citizen) is in the tank.

We know the candidates will not help us, because to do so would be to penalize others, those who keep the show rolling.  So we are fed a ration of appearances, and are left to construct a meaning.

All candidates show wearing the open collar shirt, sleeves rolled up, as though going to supervise some mythical shop team which long-ago hied to Bangalore.  The contraindicated message is that they are just like you and me, the "us" that existed in a thriving work economy of some mythical time of yore.  This political season is of interest only to the student of semiotics and pragmatics, and even then it's thin gruel.

We know these men all are elite power brokers who want nothing more than to harvest our vote, as we trudge through life hoping to salvage scraps of dignity and some purpose. They present to us the illusion of Ward Cleaver, the reflection of an America which has passed by ... Tattersall plaid shirts and chinos be damned.

Perhaps the most interesting/peculiar member of this sham team of politicos is would-be Vice President Paul Ryan, he of the insane zombie eyes.  His look is either pure Xanax, or he is chomping at the bit to re-Christainize a non-Christian nation.  Ryan is either a zealot or a zombie, or perhaps a little of both.  As with George W. Bush, the script is that the elder Romney will supposedly keep him in check.

The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi deconstructed the Romney image/reality well:

“Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart.... It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning.”  

Symbol versus reality -- we seem in the twilight of our discernment, and have succumbed due largely to ennui to this form of political terror being foisted upon us.

All of the candidates are converging into a singularity; "unidimensional" would be the charitable term.  The terror is in reaching that singularity, for then life will become infinitely distorted, and there will be no escape.

When we cross that line, an acronym will be all she wrote: WFIO.