“Masques Off! Masques Off!” Cried America

“Masques Off! Masques Off!” Cried America July 28, 2015

The Masque of the Red Death, Aubrey Beardsley/Public Domain
The Masque of the Red Death, Aubrey Beardsley/Public Domain

Honestly, it’s beginning to feel like “The Masque of the Red Death”, around here.

Here is Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, a man who can recognize a Potemkin village, when he sees one:

A DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE, MASQUERADING AS A COMEDIAN: Jon Stewart’s secret White House visits.

UPDATE: Jon Stewart Secretly Met with Obama, Worked ‘In Concert’ with White House. Potemkin Village? We’ve got a whole freakin’ Potemkin Culture.

Indeed. This line popped out at me, in the Mediaite report: According to former Obama aide Austan Goolsbee, “the president wanted to counter his critics on the left and lay the groundwork for his 2012 re-election campaign.”

Kind of wonder if co-ordination between a White House and influential members of media during a Presidential campaign should be considered, at the very least, an in-kind contribution, and noted as such. Otherwise, that’s kind of like…fraud, isn’t it?

Yes, we all know politics is illusion; entertainment is illusion. Increasingly, “the news” is illusion, too — more analysis than content, more opinion than fact. The patina of dispassion our news media once at least attempted to keep polished and intact has been completely worn away by a continual drizzle of partisan acid, and now the corrosion is exposed for all to see. Like headstones in an untended graveyard, their forms and shapes are altered; their essential natures — blockish and immovable — are on display.

We’ve always been surrounded by fakery, but — as with any masquarade — until the masques come off, you can convince yourself that you’re traveling with what is before your eyes. That seems no longer possible. Everything is, as Elaine Benes once admitted:

Yep, it’s all fake. Social science reports? Fake. Much of Obamacare rhetoric? Fake. DOE discrimination reports? Fake. Job gains? Fake. New and Improved Clintons? Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. Something as sturdy, reliable and innocuous as the New York Times Bestseller list? Fake.

Oh, and Planned parenthood’s insistence that certain videos were faked via editing? fake. The assurances that a quest for “marriage equality” would threaten no church or livelihood? yeahhh…that’s still developing.

Masques are coming off. It’s a good thing. You have to have the masques in your hand to see what you’re dealing with (if it is visible to the eye) and to understand what is inexorably barreling down the pike at you.

Of course, by then, it may be too late to do anything about it.

Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death…

Excuse me. Pleurisy again. I’m a tad cranky.


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