A Bogus New World

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell

We recently had the opportunity to watch a few pro baseball games on TV. We knew there would be no fans in attendance because of the league’s self-imposed COVID-19 rules. The game began routinely as in any normal season. Then, oddly, we thought we heard the low-level cacophony of human voices. After a few pitches, the camera panned briefly up into the seats behind home plate. People!

Not quite. We only got a short glimpse, but the people looked weird. And their collective mumbling had a constant unchanging volume, disconnected from what was happening on the field. It was as if none of them were paying any attention to the game. The camera panned past them again. They’re FAKE! Cardboard cutouts of people placed in the seats. The low-level crowd noise was also fake – being broadcast over the stadium speaker system.

An argument broke out between the home plate umpire and one of the coaches. Both men approached each other yelling and gesticulating, typical of many on-field disputes. In this instance however, both were wearing their COVID-19 face masks. What we normally see when a good baseball argument of this sort escalates is the coach getting as physically close to the umpire as he can without touching him. When it’s really heated, the coach will dramatically turn the bill of his cap behind his head so he can advance the last three inches closer to the umpire’s face, yelling but still not touching. In this case however, that usual thrilling display of hat-turning aggression was replaced by the coach violently thrusting down his COVID-19 mask. Holy Toledo! That coach is so mad he wants to infect the umpire. This demonstrated a far greater degree of anger than anything he could’ve done with his hat. It bordered on attempted murder! The coach knows that even if he’s thrown out of the game, his righteous fury could continue inflicting harm long after he’s gone.

We felt like we’d entered the twilight zone. The players and announcers seemed to take all this in stride as if it were somehow “normal”. The announcers even told you how you could purchase your very own cardboard avatar. It was clear there had been a wholesale transformation (at least in the baseball world) into accepting and living in this pseudo reality. Clearly, we had not yet made the mental leap. Are we the Luddites who are behind the times and not adapting?

To return to some semblance of reality, we decided to turn off sports and watch a little bit of the coverage of the Democrat National Convention. Again, we knew there would be no people in attendance because of COVID-19 restrictions and realized the speakers would have a tougher job. What struck us however was how the convention organizers attempted to “normalize” this condition. They took it to that same freaky level of pretend, most tellingly during Kamala Harris’s speech.

The first thing that hit us was the backdrop. A set of mirrors shone behind the speaker reflecting all the emptiness where the raucous delegates would normally be cheering. It was as if they wanted us to experience that emptiness. Then it got baseball weird at the end of her recitation. When Harris was finished speaking, she pretended to interact with a virtual crowd on a large Zoom screen. She pointed to people on the screen as if to communicate individual recognition. Of course, those on the other end had no idea who she was pointing to. Next, Harris’s husband came out on stage along with Joe Biden and his wife. As the couples posed yards apart, all four of them smiled and waved to a non-existent crowd in the vacant seating area of the room. It was creepy. The news anchors seemed unfazed by all this in their post-speech commentary, treating it all as ordinary – just like the baseball announcers.

We were struck with self-doubt. Is all this imaginary stuff the new reality and our own heads are the ones still stranded in the (now) distant past? Accepting “make-believe” appears to be what we are supposed to do today to fit in.

We’re not there. We will proudly accept the label of freaks for seeing this fakery for what it is – deranged and macabre. There is a sickness to all this that can best be appreciated by thinking back to this time last summer. Imagine if a movie came out one year ago that depicted a future with cardboard people attending sporting events and politicians waving to non-existent crowds in empty rooms. Would you pay to go watch that movie, or blow it off as a low budget sci-fi film?

Wherever you fall with all this, don’t underestimate the ability of the media and politicians to take full advantage of tacit public acceptance of dissimulation. If you allow your brain to accept some or all of these charades as a “normal” consequence of a new reality, you will be an easy mark for propaganda.

An excellent example is all the recent hyper discussion about the US Postal Service. After decades of decline because of the inexorable march of email and other forms of Internet based messaging, the Postal Service has rocketed up to being the most critical entity in the universe in just the last few weeks. Suddenly, if we don’t pump billions of dollars into the Postal Service and halt the ongoing and entirely appropriate depreciation of outdated equipment and operations within the system, we will have a national crisis. We are being made to think this has to do with fair voting. It does not. That’s pure disinformation. But it is an accusation that is successfully redirecting attention from other significant matters.

It is more important now than ever to stay grounded in reality. Consume the news with a highly sensitive “common sense” personal filter. If the words and visuals are riddled with contextual oddities, it is probably an attempt to propagandize. During the next couple months before the election, we expect there will be many more attempts to reshape reality and get us to accept facsimile as authentic.