christopher de la Torre

Blue. Red. All I see is a deep shade of purple.

Alright, now I’m getting into this campaign. And leave it to someone like republican consultant Alex Castellanos to be my reason.

One thing to keep in mind: our unemployment rate is rising (5% this year over 4.5% last year). If percentages don’t materialize in your noggin, think population. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7.6 million people are unemployed this year over 6.8 million last year. That’s almost 1,000,000 people losing their jobs in one year. And, according to the bureau’s site summary, the industries hit the hardest are construction (duh), manufacturing and retail (more duh). The point? We’re going to have a lot more people pissed off at the polls this year. And, by the sound of the media and the general public, we’ve got a crap shoot between two big issues: money (or lack of it) and “morality” (or an overabundance of it).

Interesting.

Not enough time to go over both money and morality, so I’ll broach the topic I feel most people are concerned with right now: money.

The fact that this Democratic duke-out has taken so damn long was starting to get on my nerves. I even started to become impatient with Hillary, thinking for a quick second she might be irresponsibly damaging the integrity of the party, further dividing the country, saying things the media said she said, and so on. But then I thought, we should be so lucky to have someone completely determined to bring us the leadership we need to fight both oppressors abroad and finesse the establishment here at home. I think the point isn’t to “shake” Washington to its core. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Obama seems to think it was.

Far be it for me to judge the political situation here and call the shots, but I am of the opinion that changing Washington isn’t going to happen in four years (the political equivalent to ‘overnight’). It’s safe to say neither candidate is using “revolutionary” tactics to get into the White House, so why bother once you’re in? Hillary had already spent $157 million before the end of March, sources say, and Obama can build a mansion on the Moon with the money he’s raised. McCain can’t even keep up, financially. Now how’s that for a GOP mind-f*#k.

I would say that I care about the Reverend Wright scandal, but I don’t. I would say I buy into all of the “young” and “inexperienced” rhetoric that’s been flying around; indeed, I’ve been one to pit Obama’s inexperience against Hillary’s tenure. But that’s not the real issue, is it? After all, hypocrisy is everywhere. It’s just brought out into the open during election time. Everyone knows that.

Smart people in America have to think long and hard about what’s at stake here. The problem is we can’t much think about anything anymore. It’s come down to pure pathos for us, enshrouded in the digital entertainment-complex of now. Sensory manipulation begets intellectual deprivation. We’re not even concerned about getting ‘through it’ anymore; we’re concerned with holding onto jobs we hate, filling our pockets with useless garbage like cell phones that don’t work, filling our bodies with implants so we can look ‘pretty,’ hanging gaudy jewelry from our necks, bloated with the insults that trip from our tongues and the hatred that spews like bile from our hearts when we can’t understand the diversity we see around us. But let me not digress: the vast majority of us are controlled. Controlled by what? By the little thing that follows us everywhere we go. No, not bad Rihanna tunes we can’t seem to shake. We are controlled by money.

Is this political battle really over saving our economy, our healthcare and quality of life, our national security? Or is it more about keeping in tune with the status quo, keeping the power where it is, and terrifying the masses into submission because, after all, we’ve gotten so terribly out of control?

New York Magazine hit me again with a short but sweet conversation (actually, an ichat interview) between Alex Castellanos and journalist John Heilemann, concerning this year’s presidential frontrunners. It’s an interesting exchange, to say the least; the media, in this instance, gives the casual reader ample room to ‘get back on track’ with the candidates, perhaps placing the media hailstorm in better perspective while stroking us, one way or the other, with views on how (and why) each runner might win.

But what really tickles me isn’t the flamboyant wordsmith pitter-patter between Castellanos and Heilemann (which is thoroughly enjoyable, btw); it’s the comments that follow: one in response to an ongoing connotation of Obama’s liability due to his age, another to the misguided opinion of Castellanos that GWB stood alone and kept our country safe, and the other accusing Obama of being a “flunky of the General Mediterranean criminal enterprise,” as if any white man with the last name ‘Smith’ who raised $200 million for his campaign couldn’t possibly be suspect.

Must it always come back to money?

Debt has us so poor that between freedom and food, we’d have to choose food. After all, if the government took away our credit cards we couldn’t afford to feed ourselves. Debt has us so poor we can’t think straight. Albeit a less concrete example than, say, organized religion or ensuring the conditions of production, debt is just another way the system keeps us in check. Money is the reason we don’t have sufficient healthcare, the reason we haven’t realized new energy policies, the reason the Towers came down. And you know what? There’s nothing we can do about it. Or is there?

Ah, yes. There’s nothing like a captive audience.

New York Mag Interview