Sam Smith – I covered my first Washington story over sixty years ago and lately I have trying to recall without success another tale that has been reported as badly as the current campaign between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
While the media is still harping on Biden’s difficulties in a recent debate and attacking him for an age a mere three years more than Trump’s, it still rarely reminds readers and viewers that Biden has done quite a good job as president and that his opponent has been found guilty of 34 crimes, told 30,000 lies while he was president, had six bankruptcies, and caused nearly two dozen women to accuse him of sexual abuse. It has treated Trump as if he was a normal politician – misinformation that not only endangers the election but the very survival of America. The real choice in November is not just between Biden and Trump but between democracy and dictatorship.
Trump is more a huge beneficiary of this crisis rather than a creator of it. Recent decades of advertising, public relations and show business has altered our handling of reality to such a degree that it is nowhere near what it once was. Now you alter reality with words and pictures rather than with action, virtue, imagination and creativity.
In trying to understand the nature of this change, I realize that I write much less frequently about new ideas and approaches because they appear so irrelevant to those with real power. It is now show business that seems to change things these days, not substance.
And we no longer distinguish between good action and bad acting.
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