Meta-than-thou

I’m such a coward. Despite the fact that there were live feeds of it all over the ‘net, I found myself experiencing (because neither ‘watching’, nor ‘listening’, nor ‘reading’, seem entirely accurate) the second presidential debate via the blog comments at Atrios. It’s something akin to being unable to bear to watch the penalty shoot-out at the end of a World Cup semi-final, with the added reason that listening to Shrub gives me the heebie-jeebies at the best of times, never mind when he’s in full Dubya mode, swaggering and winking and Texanising the pathetic failed-patrician frat boy that’s hiding underneath the shell Karen and Karl and the other handlers create for him. That way I can peek out from under the covers only once I know it’s safe.

In theory I should abhor the idea of placing partisan filters between me and something like this — but then it’s not as if the debates were ever going to make a difference to how I see the whole circus. In fact, I find it fascinating. It’s a bit like one of those photographs the Independent used to love to have on its front page (maybe still does): where everyone else would have bog-standard photograph of Important Public Figure Looking Important, the Indy would have a photograph of the press-gaggle taking photographs of the Important Public Figure Looking Important. It’s a stylistic move that says: hey, we know this is all a big game, and we’re far too clever and meta-than-thou to be with that rabble.

So, perceiving the debate through the real-time comments allows me to get the debate at-a-distance, but a very raw and immediate reaction to it. And I don’t have to endanger my blood-pressure and thinning hair by listening to Shrub unprotected, as it were.

From this perspective, it’s quite overwhelming just how meta the US presidential stuff is. And I don’t just mean by that the obvious, decades-old awareness of the power of the visual, and the value of style as opposed to substance. It’s become a war of sorts, a propaganda D-Day in which bloggers act as foot-soldiers, flooding online votes, pushing talking points and corrections to talking points to the established media, picking up the threads of conspiracy theories until either the whole jumper unravels or they find that there really is something there at the other end. None of the votes are real any more — if they ever were. What’s being tested is the effectiveness of the partisan mobilisation. It’s basically American Idol, though for a slightly larger prize.

Actually that’s not quite right. The starry bloggers (like Atrios, Kos and Josh Marshall on the left) are more like generals in the field, issuing orders in the thick of the battle to their readers — the comments sections of such blogs serving as a loud background of radio chatter.

The meta-levels stack up like a Tower of Babel, crushing the actual content down into subterranean strata. No-one talks about policies any more. They talk about how well the candidates performed relative to expectations. Facial expressions. The deep meaning of an eye-roll or an exasperated sigh. Laughably flawed polls make the headlines, while real statistics of fatalities in a faraway place come way below the fold. Conspiracy theories abound. Stories of dirty tricks, rebuttals and rebuttals of rebuttals. Concerns about polling systems. In the most powerful democracy in the world, concerns about the reliability of polling systems. Worse still, concerns about the partisan manipulation of polling.

It’s actually quite exhausting, this year-long media fuck-fest and donation drive for producers of Grandiose Graphics. It’s exhausting to care so much, yet feel so powerless. Just like watching Stuart Pearce walk up to take that penalty, the stakes so high that it’s no longer about football.