Irony isn’t dead, but its golden age has passed.  Now we enter days of meta.  Popping around the major news networks last night and the major newspapers this morning I found not a single story or dialog about what the candidates said.  Nobody was interested in truth or relevance of the debate, instead all efforts were directed at the likely reactions of voters.  Perception now reigns supreme; reality is buried so deep that only the most catastrophic challenges (total melt down of Wall Street) can make a dent.  How has it come to this? 

Truth has always been elusive, even more so now that most of us have learned to deconstruct everything into meaninglessness. A tragedy that, I imagine that Jacques Derrida is spinning in his grave almost as fast as Einstein.  Deconstruction was meant to force an examination of our beliefs, to show the frailty of our perceptions, instead we use it to destroy any challenges to our ideologies.  We could blame the French for this state of affairs, but it takes a brand of American obstinacy and a willful inconsistency of thought that the French, addled as they are by wine and heavy food, cannot muster.  

For a time we were a nation of hard eyed pragmatists, then we became the land of salesmen, now we are the home of wishful thinkers.  We take inconvenient truths and avoid them were possible, misunderstand them when convenient, and deny them outright as a course of last resort.  Facts are pushed into the gristmill of our various ideologies until all the complicated corners and crenulations are ground down into an inoffensive pap that our toothless minds can easily digest.  

Any explanation that includes nuance or caveats is a demonstration of weakness, only that which can be expressed in absolutes carries any weight.  Any compromise or concession to other opinions or even reality itself shows an inherent flaw in all that we might say.  Metaphors are shaken, stirred, mixed, and regarded as logical posits.  In this manner we dispense with policies that might actually work and instead blunder this way and that, like some sort of enraged bovine in a store full of easily breakable things.

In other words, we dispense with any concerns about “does this potential leader of the free world have a clue?” and go right to, “how will they be perceived by obstinate simpletons who have taken our democracy hostage?”