Cat Show 10/23/2020

VG: Well, we’ve finally watched the civilized debate of 2020. No insults, no flies, no Toobin moments. What do you make of it? And what are your predictions for the 2020 election, which some liberals view as “election of the century,” while skeptics dismiss them as “another charade by capitalist-imperialist complex.”

ALICE: Skeptics and cynics –like Hobbs here – mock everything, always missing elephants in the room. If you look at the western newspapers at the time of Soviet Perestroika, you would find the same thing – just a trick of communists, nothing is changing, no matter what Gorbachev or Yeltsin say or promise. Well, these guys changed a lot of things. And so did Trump, who pulled our country back to the XIX century greed, intolerance, and myopia.

HOBBS: I would agree that changes do occur. And yes, Trump is a much more dynamic candidate. Biden, on the other hand, represents nothing but the desire of the establishment to preserve the status quo. And the best way to do it, is to change some decorations. Changing decorations, banners, updating the style – that’s what Americans are very good at. In fact, that’s how one enters the establishment. Look at Obama – the most successful American of recent times. He provided the establishment with the make-over job and they loved it. Biden – his less-successful and less imaginative side kick, will try to do the same. Business as usual – which after Trump’s excesses --would look like a revolutionary make-over.

VG: Good point, both. Well, sometimes we have to change style, and sometimes – substance. Establishment might resist changes, but the world is changing, and rapidly so. Just feeding the blob, or swamp, or deep state -- by giving it what it wants —is hardly a viable strategy in today’s world of pandemics, and quickly changing economic maps, mobility and so on. I don’t know what you saw yesterday during the debate, but I saw only one thing. Biden is pro-establishment and can’t even imagine anything outside the box that he helped to creat during his forty seven years of establishment service, while Trump is a disrupter. Not a consistent one, not a thoughtful one, not necessarily a benevolent one, but a disrupter nevertheless.

HOBBS: Well, in that case, we have to ask one thing. Had the establishment been good for the majority of the people? We know that the business as usual model is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Establishment establishes all sorts of organizations, and treaties, which then begin to function to support themselves. Western establishment is not that of aristocracy or a party. Anyone with ambition, talents, and desire to please can enter. But there are no more than 30% of these “anyones.” How is the rest of the population doing?

ALICE: We know that they are not doing well at all under Trump. His taxes are unfair, his rhetoric encourages haters and racists, he ignores science and threatens our future. And, he even threatens the establishment by mocking mass media, or security agencies, or smart money movers and shakers who operate on global scale. And we know from history: you can screw the people as much as you want, but don’t tinker with the establishment. They won’t be as forgiving as a common man. Biden, on the other hand, knows how the cookie crumbles. He learns quickly what are the guidelines that the State Department issues vis a vis, say, China, or Ukraine, and he sends his son to these countries. The son takes his salary only from those who want these guidelines and policies implemented. None of this breaks the law. Just getting rich on the inside-establishment information.

HOBBS: Are you trying to say that Biden didn’t twist Europeans’ arms to make them pursue the policies that fitted his son’s new job? And that he was twisting European arms simply because that was the State Department recommendations, formulated already by Victoria Nuland. Screw the EU and that type of thing. That’s interesting. And rather cynical.

ALICE: Why break a law or do something stupid and dangerous -- like your clown Trump - -when you can just obama it, that is, put a modern style on old policies. That’s what the art of governance is all about. Old wine in new skins.

VG: Wow, I guess, you, Alice, was listening to NPR for a reason. Now you know very well how it works. That explains Biden’s turn around on the fracking issue. Establishment can’t live without fracking, as it can’t live without plenty of nasty and destructive policies, like pushing the world to the brink of war if not further. But it is not Trump’s in-your-face-obnoxious-climate-denial fracking. It is fracking with a human face. It is fracking for people from Scranton. It is fracking for all sorts of underprivileged minorities. It is progressive fracking, in other words.

HOBBS: Progressive fracking researched by progressive scientists, promoted on the progressive social platforms, and verified by progressive security agencies. Same applies to the progressive masks and progressive war on Covid. Which under Biden won’t be much different than under Trump, except that all state functions would be carried in masks, so that the whole Washington would be renamed Masked City.

VG: Well, you still didn’t answer my question as to who will run the Masked City, or Unmasked City, for the next four years.

ALICE: Biden will. The combination of establishment interests, mass media propaganda, and Obama’s makeover technologies are irresistible. And common people, who consult their pockets before they vote for the candidate that the establishment wants them to vote – wouldn’t find much in their pockets. So they won’t resist. Who wants to be poor and be run by racists, when you can be poor and be run by progressives?

HOBBS: I’ll take Trump. I suspect that common people do sense that the times are changing. And they would prefer disrupter now as they did four years ago. And frankly - -that’s the key argument - -establishment of the last 40 years hasn’t been good to them. Maybe right after the WWII, the status quo worked for the majority. Now it works for less and less people. And makeovers do not always cover ugly face. Not even when it is covered by a mask.