Pop Friday: The DNC and the VMAs – One Night, Two Scripted Coronations

 

Fascistic and imperialistic societies are defined by the gatekeepers who dole out success to the people lucky enough to catch their attention. Free individuals tend rather to grant success to those who earn it from them one-by-one through hard work, effort, and appealing to their specific interests. Conversely, the winners in a corrupt society achieve success instead by ignoring the rules and looking smooth while doing it. Laser light shows, holograms, auto-tuned vocals, and dubstep remixes are the bread and circuses of today’s age, distracting us from the dismantling of prosperity and freedom taking place in the world.

Last night, imperial excess was on grand display as two similarly vacuous events took place in the same night. Millions of viewers combined tuned into either (or both) MTV’s Video Music Awards and the Democratic National Convention. In both cases, people connected to corporations with direct access to central bank discount windows chose the winners and losers.

The DNC: Convention or Coronation?

Similarly, the spectacle associated with each event trounced its alleged purpose. In the case of the DNC, activists from around the country fought hard for delegate spots so that they could influence the Democratic Party’s platform. These same activists likely worked hard to help elect Barack Obama in 2008, desperately hoping to close down Gitmo, end the misguided and illegal War on Terror, repeal the Patriot Act, and ultimately undo a host of other tragic policies put into place by George W Bush.

However, the policy agenda pursued by those activists has been largely ignored, as Obama’s governing style focused more on appealing to the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, launching more wars and doling out unprecedented corporate welfare. At the convention, a microcosm of this dynamic was on full display, as Democratic activists passed platform planks which were out of step with the Obama administration’s desire to pander to the neoconservative crowd.

To counter this, establishment forces rammed through changes to the platform, undoing the hard work of Democratic activists. Approximately 2 minutes into the below video, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa holds a voice vote to change the platform, requiring a two-thirds majority to make the change. He was reading from a teleprompter which also included a scripted result to the vote — the ayes have it. However, things got awkward when the measure clearly did not pass. Villaraigosa attempted to repeat the vote to get a better outcome. When this didn’t happen, an establishment figure walked up to the mayor and encouraged him to continue with the scripted outcome, saying into a live mic “let them do what they’re going to do.”

Along with this scripted debacle, we were treated to a speech by Joe Biden whereby the outrageously morbid campaign slogan “Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive” was repeated by the same delegates who just had their voices silenced by the scripted platform vote. Meanwhile, Forbes magazine is reporting that the government-backstopped General Motors is back on the path to bankruptcy.

Celebs like Ashley Judd stumped for Obama’s war machine, along with a performance by the Foo Fighters, as they stopped by to demonstrate their support for illegal drone warfare, indefinite detention of American citizens, extra-judicial kill lists, the Patriot Act, arbitrary wars in multiple countries around the world, and the top cheerleader of these policies, the current Commander-in-Chief. You can check out the Foo Fighters’ performance in the below video.

MTV Hosted the Annual Auto-Tune Championship for the Media-Industrial Complex, the VMAs

Over on MTV, the media-industrial complex’s reality show channel continued its odd tradition of giving awards out for music, despite having abandoned musical content nearly a decade ago in favor of scripted reality programs like The Hills and Jersey Shore. MTV is owned by Viacom, as demonstrated by this blog from Neatorama.com, one of the central-bank connected, too-big-to-fail, and anti-competition corporate-state monsters chosen by gatekeepers to dictate taste to mainstream society.

The same cast of characters came out to accept their awards. MTV awards shows share a lot in common with professional wrestling events in that the same characters come out each time and accept the same awards in a different order, pre-determined ahead of time by the same people. Despite a robust internet full of amazing independent artists, many of whom are gaining more traffic online than MTV’s fiat-funded, credit-backed autotune favorites, major label pretty faces singing songs written by other people, meticulously produced to hide flaws caused by the performer’s lack of interest in rehearsing, won the vast majority of the awards for the day.

Viewers were treated to what was essentially a promotional event for a small number of marketing execs behind lifestyle brands called Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift. Hard-working independent artists who toil on tour in clubs were not on the radar of those few gatekeepers putting together this infomercial for the two artists each major label is allowed to “push” each year.

Regardless of which spectacle one might have tuned into last night, the vast majority of mainstream Americans were treated to an evening of scripted pageantry where the narrow interests of the military and media industrial complexes took priority over the good-natured instincts of everyday people.

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