Jason Thompson was one of my regular listeners at FM 94/9 while he was stationed with the U.S. Navy in San Diego, and he continues to write thoughtful pieces on music, literature, Generation X culture, and our current political era. As part of our coverage of the sabotage of federal agencies, we’re happy to include this piece from Jason here.
By Jason Thompson
Dr. Mehmet Oz, esteemed peddler of overpriced miracle cures, has been tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. With a scalpel in one hand and snake oil in the other, the good doctor promises to transform healthcare into a “truly American” endeavor: expensive, confusing, and utterly useless. CMS, meet the Wizard of Fraud.
Meanwhile, Linda McMahon, titan of staged combat and aspiring choreographer of public education, is our new Secretary of Education. Finally, a leader who understands that schools, like wrestling matches, are best run with drama, scripted outcomes, and minimal intellectual rigor. Expect algebra classes to end with body slams, and lunch periods to feature steel cage debates about whether kids really need books.
Welcome to the new cabinet of curiosities, where government policy is just another late-night infomercial. You put the coin in the jukebox, now you have to hear the whole song. Except 76 million of us put a coin in, so now we have to hear “Mambo No. 5,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” and “The Thong Song” for four consecutive years.
Ah, the noble rural voter: the yeoman ideal resurrected from Jeffersonian dreams and clad in a flannel shirt stitched together by the GOP’s media machine. One imagines them astride tractors — modern chariots of democracy — wielding pitchforks not for hay but for the defense of all that is true and American, as opposed to the perfidious, latte-sipping degenerates cloistered in cities and suburbs. It is an extraordinary feat, this anointment of the rural American as the sole custodian of virtue, accomplished while billionaires dangle puppet strings from the balconies of gilded skyscrapers.
The critique of Democrats as “elitists” is particularly rich — dare I say decadent — when whispered through the velvet corridors of a GOP that cradles actual oligarchs in the bosom of its power structure. These billionaires, lords of lucre and masters of manipulation, have somehow escaped the scorn reserved for those with advanced degrees or an appreciation for kale smoothies. The real elites, it seems, are anyone who prefers public transit over a pickup truck, rather than the tycoons jetting to Davos to sip aged scotch and discuss which planet to colonize next.
And yet, we are told, it is the Democrats who have abandoned the working class. Let us pause and marvel at this irony. The party that dares to propose taxing the gilded few to fund health care and public education is accused of betrayal, while the party that stuffs its coffers with corporate cash convinces the downtrodden that the enemy resides in Brooklyn lofts rather than corporate boardrooms. Indeed, populism has become a spectacle: a carnival game where billionaires don trucker hats and cry crocodile tears for the common man, all while gutting labor protections and slashing social programs.
The “heartland,” as mythologized in political discourse, is a stage upon which this farce is performed. It is not a real place but a rhetorical cudgel used to divide and conquer. To speak of the coasts versus the heartland is to perpetuate a false dichotomy, as though America’s greatness resides only in cornfields and silos while the cities — those engines of commerce, culture, and innovation — are dismissed as parasitic dens of iniquity. The irony here is profound: the supposed disdain of “coastal elites” for the working class is dwarfed by the GOP’s contemptuous manipulation of rural voters as pawns in their power games.
Finally, let us address the notion that Democrats are obsessed with “far-left social issues” to the detriment of economic concerns. It is a clever sleight of hand, worthy of the finest card sharks, to frame basic human rights as a distraction from economic justice. Affordable health care, living wages, and climate action are not indulgences — they are the backbone of any serious working-class agenda. Yet the GOP, in its infinite cynicism, has convinced many that to seek dignity is to be a radical, while offering them nothing but grievance and a gilded carrot dangled just out of reach.
Elections do indeed have consequences, but let us not be blind to whose consequences we are living through. If there is a divide in this country, it is not between the heartland and the coasts but between those who are dazzled by the false light of populist rhetoric and those who see it for what it is: a bonfire of vanities lit by billionaire matchsticks. Let us hope, however faintly, that the smoke clears before the entire house burns down.
Jason Thompson is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer and works at the University of Michigan. Read more from Jason at Ear Candy Update on Substack.
Banner photo by Steven Snodgrass, © 2009 some rights reserved.