BY BOB BEARDEN
We got a huge dose of Reality TV in the form of the Republican National Convention. Speaker after speaker assured us that the pandemic has been conquered and all is well in America. There in a nutshell is exactly what is wrong with reality TV. Reality TV is not reality at all, but a scripted scenario spoken by people who have been given a script, plastered with makeup and are essentially actors acting out a video.
The RNC was scripted by Stephen Miller, chief script writer for the GOP and a Joseph Goebbels look-alike, sound-alike and wanna-be-alike. It was as fake as the old $3 bill. It was the selling of an America that does not exist. And it was reality TV at its worst. Led by a man [and I use than term loosely] who stood by proudly accepting accolades he does not deserve for things he did not do.
It was a cotton candy world of white supremacy embraced by a group of 1,500 pandemic defying sycophants inured to what is happening in the real world, led by the world’s No. 2 sycophant [Putin is No. 1 with a bullet]. They were telling a scripted storyline that does not exist except maybe in the wildly delusional mind of Stephen Miller and donald j. trump.
Masks? They did not need no stinkin’ masks to paraphrase a line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre– they had the trumpster to lead them to the Promise Land. A promised land where only white people reign and all other people are excluded from being anything besides props to be used as fodder to feed the masses who stand ready in the suburbs with automatic rifles in hand to ward off the invading hordes of the great unwashed.
The raw and brazen spectacle in all of its horrific glory with The People’s House in the background being used as a prop to splash false accolades upon a person who is the most abject failure as a president as could there ever be imagined.
The degrading of one of our most sacred institutions and landmarks by a group of people who have lost touch with reality and find themselves bathed in the most outlandish reality TV show ever conceived or contrived. It is time he and all who collude with him are voted off the island that is our democratic republic. Our democracy can’t stand much more of these alternate facts.
– Bob Bearden is chair of the Board of Trustees of the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation, and a member of Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City
