Sunday, May 14, 2006

Down With Crappy Animated Line Drawings!

This little piece of pro-corporate propoganda (link via Unfogged) is several flavors of horseshit. What's noteworthy to me, though, is the totally retro-flava of one of its central rhetorical tricks.

Back in the 1990's, in the heydaze of the dotbomb, you'll recall how we were all one glorious democratic mass of pulsating entrepreneurial spirit, our desires finally truly represented by that most micro-democratic system of all: the Market. And remember how it was that horrible ol' government, with its stodgy unhep beurocrats, was truly Our Enemy just as corporate America was We The People? I am You as Ken Laye is Me and therefore the corporations should be free - they will be decent in a way the government can't! As anyone who lived in a state served by Enron now knows, that was, charitably, not true.

So it's fitting to hear a former Voice of Clinton making that same conflation now. When he says "let the people, not the government decide..." he's trying to pull the trick of making us believe that AT&T and Verizon are We The People. I'm sure that anyone who's been awake for the last 4 days is asking "ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME?"