Obama was able to present an image of handsome racially-acceptable trust. With that trust he shafted all those joyous souls who were so enthused by his election as president.
Instead of ending regime change wars he initiated them. Instead of helping the people he helped Wall Street.
Obama was the smooth PR actor who snowed America by promising change and delivering the same old status quo of elitism and foreign wars.
Biden now attempts to snow America with another image entirely, that of the avuncular old uncle, the grandfather you always wanted who you could trust implicitly.
It’s yet another PR construct where what you are made to want is never what you get.
Biden is a thug and always has been. His advanced years will not have modified the monster inside one iota. He is a law and order right wing freak who has picked another law and order right wing freak to stand next to him.
In the age of image what you see is definitely not what you get.
What you will see is a somewhat doddery but extremely affable old man with a gentle, smiling liberal at his side.
What you will get is an administration calling for more war and more incarceration of Americans, an administration that pretends to have a kind face but acts with utmost cruelty. You will see war glorified, and those who wage war called undoubted heroes. You will see xenophobic hatred of alternative styles of governance dressed up as resolute defence and patriotism. You will see corporate America, Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex lauded as the eternal bastions of freedom.
You will be told you live in “The Free World” while being ever more enslaved.
You will hear the highly trained and skilled liars of the CIA, NSA, FBI and all U.S. police forces backed to the hilt as the ultimate truth-tellers. The legalized murderers of the U.S. military will be likewise lionised.
A list of “enemies” will be issued once more for you to direct your hate at while your liberties are curtained and removed at home.
But U.S. mainstream media will reflect none of this after emitting the huge sigh of relief on Donald Trump being removed from office is a mass fumigation of Washington. A fumigation which will be distinctly partial. The entire pool of Democratic Party swimmers within the infamous swamp Trump safeguarded will emerge pure as newly fallen snow.
The cavalry will have emerged over the hilltop, the knight errants will have vanquished the evil dragon and saved the princess. And they will get to work making sure you know it and demonizing anyone who says different.
Image is all in U.S. politics, Obama and Biden show how the fantasy-land that is American “reality” can be adjusted quite easily to suit the required outcome. However, the lesson of Hillary Clinton is that the face needs to fit.
Biden has the face that fits. Harris has the face that fits.
But after November 3rd the masks will no longer be quite so required. Mainstream media will maintain the earlier illusions so carefully established in every article published and news broadcast aired.
Meanwhile Trump’s cohort of angry white men, those deluded by Trump’s anti-war lies and whatever rump of simplistic believers in his moronic statements survive will be shunned and condemned as the new internal enemy of unified America.
And so the merry-go-round starts over where an opposition of hate moves onto the streets to vent its frustration only to meet the cops of Biden and Harris rather than those of Trump.
So the images rotate and shift within the mirror of the society we are all supposed to envy.
We will see the same old smoke and mirrors in revolving political doors as America descends further into the abyss of irrelevancy as China rises to provide voices speaking of a new reality.