The amount of corruption flotsam and scandal debris swirling around former Secretary Hillary Clinton is at any given time measured in the amount of sunlight its sheer volume blots out from the sky. A simple light meter, like that used by a photographer, can virtually be held aloft and used to determine if it’s a low-scandal day, or a Wednesday. At some point one has to wonder if, like “The Third Way” or like the 24-hour “War Room” politics invented by the Clintons in the 90s we have not been witness to the birth of a new type of political personality management — one which Donald Trump seems also to have hitched his atrocious gilded wagon to.
Joseph Goebbels, the infamous propagandist and human monster, coined a term for something called “The Big Lie,” that is, a lie so often repeated that it becomes accepted as the truth. Clinton first, and Trump now, seem to have hit upon a type of self-preservation strategy not unlike the Big Lie: it's the "Shitty Shoe." Apologies for the French.
Social media and peer-to-peer communication is finally shining bright light on the dark stain of the American Political Animal in its filthy den.
It’s a terrible name, for a terrible strategy, executed by terrible people. It’s the antithesis of what we need in leadership for this country, or for a supermarket or a gas station or God help us, a school. It’s the primary method of deflection and answer for both our candidates and we as a nation are falling for it like a drunk with Meniere’s disease.
Say you’ve just received an undersized envelope from your bank. Without opening it, you already know it means you’ve overdrafted your account. (This analogy, by the way, will prove incomprehensible to our current candidates.) Your brow furrows as you tear into it to see what it was that pushed you over the edge, and as you step away from the mailbox, you plant your foot firmly in a steaming pile of the neighbor dog’s latest evacuation.
There’s nothing worst than stepping in dog poop.
Actually, there are A LOT of things worse than that, but stepping in dog poop is the type of thing that demands immediate, total attention. STOP. Don’t track it anywhere. Look around for a culprit. Curse. Look around for a stick to use to scrape it off. Try the curb, the grass. The overdraft statement. Walk on your heels until you get to the hose, clean it up the best you can, wipe it in the grass some more and…what were you doing before?
The overdraft! Oh God, this couldn’t have come at a worse time! The mortgage is due and…
Oh. My. God. Another pile of dog poop. This time the other shoe. You tear up the overdraft statement in your fury and you, like time, forget.
That is the Shitty Shoe. No matter how big the scandal. No matter how bad it makes the candidate look or how obviously, if examined in isolation, something should disqualify the candidate from the role of most responsible person in the world, make the reader step in dog poop again and again, over and over, and not only will the story will disappear, it’ll becomes smaller. Less shocking. Less than. An irretrievably cast pebble into a rushing river.
In the shitty shoe strategy, you never address an allegation. You ignore it entirely unless you are physically compelled (as Clinton was) by the FBI or Congress (as Clinton was) to make a statement. The answer is now, to ignore it. Trump seems somewhat incapable of this, because his megalomania causes him to consider every citizen of the world desperate to read his latest monosyllabic tweet. But in a similar fashion, his comments are so scandalous alone, the serve to deflect from the actual scandal he may be replying to. The answer for Clinton, similarly by design or “happy” accident, is to move on to the next jaw-dropping allegation. Let it sink in just enough to mime forthrightness, then on to the next. Since the media today is best compared to an under-5 soccer game, the scrum moves in unison to the bouncing ball and stops reporting the first scandal. As its memory is quickly overshadowed by the stunning new facts coming to light, the public believes that either the issue has been resolved, that it isn’t important, or worst of all, that the candidate is entirely innocent of the accusations.
Clinton hasn’t had a press conference in almost a year. She does not answer questions from journalists. We wonder why, but this strategy helps kickstart the Shitty Shoe because it removes a direct soundbite on any given scandal from the realm of possibility, and it forces the media to find something new to not get a quote about. The Clinton campaign makes the journalists covering it write stories as if it were an off-season baseball franchise. They won’t talk trades, so who’s the one guy in the clubhouse who doesn’t like hamburgers?
...the family's invulnerability in the face of outright illegality is a badge the Clinton drones wear proudly - "We've survived scandal after scandal!"
What dog droppings have we stepped in so far? Let's make a list off the top of our head:
- Clinton flagrantly skirts campaign finance rules and robs down-ticket and local chapters of the party of hundreds of thousands of dollars - 99% of earmarked non-presidential party donations in some cases - in 38 states, all planned and perpetrated in Minnesota months before the primary.
- Clinton and the DNC collude in leaked emails to take down the Sanders campaign and hide the chosen candidate (Clinton) behind impenetrable debate scheduling and rigged caucuses.
- Clinton surrogates and party insiders dump, destroy and delist millions of ballots and hundreds of thousands of voters, disenfranchising swaths of people.
- The Clintons are found to be friends with and have accepted large donations from many ultra-rich tax-dodgers hiding money in Panama thanks to a bill Sanders opposed and Clinton championed.
- The Clinton Foundation takes millions of dollars in donations from oppressive, terror-sponsoring regimes with the worst civil rights records on earth and turns them into billions of dollars in arms deals to those same nations.
- Then the Clinton Email server is hacked – probably amongst many times, they blame ze Russians.
- Bill Clinton has a nice little chat on the airstrip with the Attorney General hours before his wife’s indictment (or not) is to be handed down.
- The Clinton email server is investigated by the FBI and she is given a stern rebuke.
- Clinton is given a stern rebuke from the State Department.
- Its revealed that Clinton was a Board member of a company that has been paying ISIS protection money and selling oil to ISIS.
- Now, the FBI is said to be investigating the aforementioned pay-for-play outright bribery taking place through the Clinton Foundation.
- Now, 15,000 more emails have been found, to be dumped on the public a week before the election and probably, not reported on.
So what’s going to happen tomorrow? It’s great theater except we’re all the guy in A Clockwork Orange. What happens when the movie ends? Do we all just accept ourselves as the monsters in our own minds and carry on with the charade of actual agency in our lives?
It seems as though if we could only dig into any one of those headlines and disseminate that full story, we’d realize that these actions are not only the steady, consistent decisions of someone above and beyond the reach of law, but each in and of themselves an affront to our democracy. Any one is bad enough to disqualify another candidate. Yet the family's invulnerability in the face of outright illegality is a badge the Clinton drones wear proudly - "We've survived scandal after scandal!"
Meanwhile, the usual gatekeepers of information – the Media and the Government – are failing us. Most likely with intent. The only thing saving us or giving us hope is that social media and peer-to-peer communication is finally shining bright light on the dark stain of the American Political Animal in its filthy den.
But allow me to return to the “Shitty Shoe” metaphor, and what we can do about it.
What terrifies our rulers — the members of these parties and their puppet masters — the most, is what the public may realize — just because there are two rotten fruit on the ground, it doesn’t mean we have to eat one.
Imagine you’re reading that overdraft notice, and tornado siren goes off a block away. Then an angry bird attacks your scalp for wandering too close to the nest, a tree branch falls on your car, and you see a toddler chase a ball into the street with distracted teen driver bearing down in a pickup truck. Then you step in dog poo.
Clarity. The dog poo fades away. The siren goes silent. The world goes slow motion and you run faster than you ever have before and you save the kid. That’s what we all want to think we’d do, right? Despite the maelstrom of disaster typhooning around you, you want to believe that you will find muscles and reflexes you’ve never before explored, kick off the ground at near-horizontal and streak across the street to save the child.
Domestically, economically, internationally, ecologically – this world and its people are running blindly into a busy street. But The Parties want us with our heads down looking at the latest mess, so we don’t see them sneaking out the back with the safe. The last thing they want is for someone to actually save the child – for such success and moral clarity would make their hedonistic greed untenable.
But it already is untenable.
If we just look up, we'll see its not about losing an election, but about fighting a system that's actively campaigning against us. Against better lives, safer streets, cleaner oceans, breathable air -- the system that we are so afraid to chose the losing side of, is, on all sides, utterly uninterested in our wellbeing.
For that reason, I don’t mind losing an election. I know I won't gain anything by "winning." But I won't sell my soul. I refuse to accept the false dichotomy that promulgates this false democracy.
What terrifies our rulers — the members of these parties and their puppet masters — the most, is what the public may realize — just because there are two rotten fruit on the ground, it doesn’t mean we have to eat one.
Look up.
There was once a tree of liberty around here somewhere. We luxuriated in its shade and played amongst its branches once. Perhaps we need only vote for green leaves and grass roots to refresh it again.