When The Show Is Over, The Actors Hold Hands And Take A Bow

President Biden and President Elect Trump met at the White House on Wednesday and shook hands and exchanged pleasantries after an emotionally exhausting presidential race in which each side accused the other of presenting an immediate existential threat to the country.

This is it. This is the real story. This image, right here.

Ignore all the fake drama. Forget all the campaign rhetoric and kayfabe conflict. This is what’s real. This is what deserves your attention.

They do not hate each other. They do not see one another as an existential threat to the nation. They are not enemies. They’re barely even opponents. When the show is over they hug and kiss like boxers after weeks of phony trash talk made solely to sell pay-per-views.

One may say his opponent is the next Hitler, coming to end democracy and take everyone’s votes and destroy the country. The other may say his opponent is a communist dictator, come to do the same. But when the play is over the performers hold hands and bow, and then they go out and have a drink together.

They each pretend to be fighting against each other in defense of you and your interests, when in reality they’re on the same side, fighting against you, in defense of the interests of oligarchy and empire.

You can see it right there. They’re not hiding it anymore. They don’t have to. It was all a show, and they’re openly admitting it. A friendly match, like two rich ladies playing tennis at the Hamptons.

They can show it openly because they know most of you won’t pay attention to what you are seeing, or if you do you’ll forget all about it and get swept up in the heat of the next election cycle. There’s so much messaging reinforcing the illusory partisan divide that these tacit little admissions tend to go completely overlooked.

Don’t get me wrong, the depravity of Trump himself is not illusory. Real people are going to suffer and die under his administration, just as real people suffered and died under Biden’s. But they themselves know they have nothing to fear. They and the powers they serve will go completely untouched by the imperial murder machine. They will die of old age surrounded by wealth and luxury, completely free from any consequences for their actions.

It was all a sham. Always is. The elections are fake and the game is rigged. The empire will march on completely uninterrupted and entirely unchanged, served by one fraudulent president after the next until its eventual collapse.

Stop buying into the performance. Stop screaming for your favorite political pro wrestler and notice that the blows aren’t connecting and the whole match is just a show.

If you want to fight the power, focus your opposition where the real power is. The war machine. Imperial power structures. Intelligence agencies. Plutocracy. Capitalism. Fully unplug your emotional energy from the illusion of electoral politics and dedicate your attention instead to the concrete movements of weapons, resources, and wealth.

As long as they can keep us clapping along with the puppet show, we’re never going to pay attention to the forces pulling the strings. We’re never going to bring enough awareness to the real problems to find actual solutions and carry them out. We’re never going to be able to bring real opposition to real power.

And that’s the whole idea. That’s why this silly puppet show keeps coming back every four years.

Stop clapping along and start looking around the theater. You know where the empire managers want you to place your attention, so start looking where they don’t want you to look.

Wake up.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-the-show-is-over-the-actors