Bernie Blackout

“I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.” — Michael Pollan

Last week, Bernie Sanders gave a major speech in Arizona on the eve of a day of primary elections in which he, by the way, was one of the major candidates. And not a single cable or network channel mentioned the speech or carried even a portion of his stirring address. This is not surprising, but maddening. The corporate media is called the corporate media for a reason: they do the bidding of the rulers of the large corporations currently ruling the world, and that bidding right now is to defeat Bernie Sanders and elect Hillary Clinton who has been their loyal puppet for her entire political career.

What about Donald Trump? In my opinion, Trump is part of the designed strategy to elect Hillary. She would struggle against any moderate Republican candidate, but against Trump she will easily win California, New York, and most of the states outside the South, and she might even win there. Bernie would beat Trump easily, too, so it is incumbent upon the corporate media to make sure the Bernie Blackout continues.

My grandmother Goody, who was what I call an optimistic fatalist, would have responded to my outrage about the Bernie Blackout by saying, “Don’t worry about Bernie. He’ll be fine.”

And I would say, “But Goody, this is not about Bernie being fine, this is about our country and the world being fine. We need Bernie to become President so we can begin the return to a society where more than privileged wealthy people get everything at the expense of everyone else.”

And she would say, “Thus it has always been, but look, things are better now than they were a hundred years ago.”

I have friends who are already angry with me for not voting for Hillary Clinton should she be the Democratic Party nominee for President. If Bernie doesn’t win the nomination, I will vote Green. My friends believe the media nonsense that Trump might win unless we all rally around Hillary. I’m not saying Trump isn’t a disturbing person or that his popularity with a certain sector of our population isn’t frightening. I’m saying he is yet another red herring, another Weapons of Mass Destruction lie to get us to go along with the game plan of the puppeteers.

My grandmother was right to say ‘Thus it has always been.’ Those in power have always done whatever they feel necessary to maintain their power, and that means identifying people who threaten the status quo and either co-opting those people or eliminating them. In Bernie’s case, they are trying to eliminate him by blacking him out. If people can’t hear him or experience the excitement he generates, they will be unlikely to vote for him. We would like to think we have moved beyond such primitive machinations, but by and large we have not.

My friends who are pre-angry with me say, ‘But Todd, Bernie has forced Hillary to the left. She’s starting to sound more like him now.”

Hello? She has changed her campaign rhetoric to obscure who she really is and to steal some of Bernie’s thunder, and we’re supposed to believe she is sincere about being in favor of things she was opposed to last week?

I am put in mind of my time in Hollywood in the 1980’s when a novel of mine was made into a movie and I was hired to write screenplays. I was eager to have more of my books made into movies and to sell my screenplays, and to that end I spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles and New York and had many meetings with producers and directors and agents and movie studio executives.

Time and again, whenever the person or people I met believed my little star was in the ascendancy, or if they thought my book or screenplay might become a hot item, I was treated like royalty, fabulous promises were made, I was wined and dined lavishly, and told with convincing sincerity by men and women, young and old, including several famous and powerful people, that my work was the best thing they had read since (name of a famous movie) and would make an equally great film. And I, little me, was the person they had been waiting to work with since the day they got into the business.

Myriad eyes filled with seemingly sincere tears as these charmers professed to a soul connection with me, and a sense of destiny about our meeting and working together. But when the deals didn’t happen, I couldn’t get past their receptionists. What astounds me, in retrospect, was how many times I fell for their baloney. And why did I keep falling for it? Because I wanted so desperately to believe they were speaking the truth.

That’s the secret of manipulating people: saying what they desperately want to believe—and not allowing them to hear anything to the contrary. Which brings me back to the Bernie Blackout. So long as the majority of people are not allowed to hear anything other than the same old corporate baloney as presented by seemingly sincere people with good hair and nice clothes appearing in profusion on our myriad screens, we will believe the stuff that comes closest to what we desperately want to believe.

The last time I took the Hollywood bait was in 1996. I was broke and scrambling to pay the rent. A big time agent called about my novel Ruby & Spear. He said, “This book completely changed how I think about the world. I feel my life finally has a meaning and a purpose. If ever a deal was going to happen, this is that deal. Send me ten copies of the book, signed, to give to the major players lining up to make this film. And send those copies Fed X, Brother, Friend, Savior, and I’ll reimburse you.”

(Todd Walton’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com)