Things You Are Wrong About & Why I’m Punishing Myself With Politics

This is all over the place because I am all over the place these days.

The pandemic is one thing. It is a huge thing. Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death and the dread of the coming Republican power grab is another thing. Tonight’s Presidential debates can only make all of this worse. Of course, I am going to watch it but I have a good reason. I’m live-responding with Gen Mag, here on Medium. I have not promised to be sober.

I generally watch these political debates as spectacle:

Guy Debord’s (1931–1994) best-known work, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity. — An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

Political spectacles have a lot in common with a Kardashian. They happen for reasons that are related to the market but divorced from clear ideas about power and publics. The political-celebrities are judged by how well they…