Team America - Not in the Playoffs

"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" - Private Hudson, Aliens (1986)

Something horrible has happened over the past, oh, say - thirty years. Politics in America has become The War on America. But this one isn't fought out on the front lines, this one is trench warfare. The trenches are so deep that neither side can see anything that isn't two feet in front of their collective faces.

Team Politics has become so prolific, so rampant, that the enlightened serf of America who has been classically trained in the art of team worship and rivalry, has become a split-camped, foam-mouthed, rabid sociopathic rotten curd of the really underbelly-cheese. Blindly so do they frolic forth, vitriol streaming from both sides. It's as if they've been trained, from a very young age, that the other side poses a threat to their very way of life, to rob the coffers and send do-gooders to the pokey, and those baddies would sell out America to get what they want - and what they want is the purity of unfiltered evil. But here's the rub: both sides think this.

Wade through all the baloney, all the rhetoric, peel back the patina of importance, look beyond the talking heads - try, just this once, to participate in the Actual Truth, and this one fact will become blindingly clear. What is the real a-bo-bo of truth here isn't quite a lie, but rather, an exaggeration. What has happened over these thirty-some-odd years is that what was once a simple and well-intentioned leadership vote has been fueled by every throbbing pundit-exaggeration into a gas fire and can be distilled into one simple question: Are you ready to submit to orifice-probing by your new Martian Nazi Overlords?

The Truth: If everyone is so wrapped up in the greased-back slime pitch of either party, convinced that the opposite team is trying to destroy America - blood-lusting, screaming, frantic - guess who wins? Take a moment and think about who stands to gain the most when a royalty-free, content generating behemoth not only takes over the airwaves, but takes over all the attention, AND - and this is the big one - AND pays through the nose for a huge chunk of prime airtime throughout the land?

Could it be? Could the media be stoking the flames of discontent, only to sell airtime to a couple of bozos who it has been established that nobody likes - and everyone is on the sidelines lapping it up like a bunch of grateful strays?