Virgin River

American politics is now pure prime-time entertainment--the USA, the NBA, MSNBC, Lizzo at The Grammys, Virgin River and so forth.

Were a movie to be made of the present domestic political moment it would not be titled "All The Presiden'ts Men" but "All The Presidents Lawyer's". A movie won't be made of the present moment, even though it's highly entertaining and the ratings extremely profitable. What's being made instead is a TV show that uses real people acting like actors in roles more or less like the role Ronald Reagan played when he was President.

And just as predicted here a year or so ago, Ronald Reagan wannabe and semi-lookalike Paul Ryan has re-surfaced. After spending a respectable amount of time "with my family," as he put it when he retired from Congress, Ryan appeared on C-SPAN the other night at some arcane institute advocating something he called, "Evidence-based Policymaking.". Sounds good to me, more or less along the lines of the Bush Administration mantra, "intelligent design," but what do I know? Very little, and less and less every day.

Experiments in Evidence-based Policymaking are now being conducted by both The Environmental Protection Agency and The Department of the Interior, where a consortium of former oil, gas, and coal lobbyists, Monsanto executives, Koch Industry playboys, right-wing think-tankers et.al are declaring wetlands, oceans, deserts, mountains etc. open and friendly to the drills of the extraction industry. I hear the deep sucking sound H. Ross Perot used to entertain us with in the 1990s, referring to NAFTA, the trade agreement the host of The Apprentice recently remade in his image and likeness.

The words quid pro quo have a comforting, even an honorable ring to them. There's something innocent in the words that, if not noble, could have been uttered in a movie made in the 1950s when the American film industry was enjoying the heyday of post-WWII prosperity and making films it hoped would sustain the social illusions we'd grown so fond of--the triumph of justice, the inalienable rights of stay-at-home moms, the wisdom of fearless Supreme Court justices. It was a time of peak Quid pro quo: I'll give you a piece of my Juicy Fruit gum if you give me a cigarette and don't tell my mother when I smoke it.

We live now in a time thorougly soaked in nostalgia; hence leadership that seems religiously committed to return us to the days pre-climate change, when we skinny-dipped in The Pacific without worrying about contracting an infectious disease, the glory days just before color TV's were invented and just after JFK was murdered. We live in a TV show now, so poorly written and acted it's actually quite entertaining, like "Virgin River" on Netflix.

Lizzo at The Grammys, Sunday, January 26, 2020. Screenshot by author.