Bonfire Bazaar
An extra round up of what's around before the main event on Tuesday
Dear friends,
This week is Bonfire Night in the UK, which historically was an attempt by the British Government to usurp pagan celebrations for what is now Halloween. It is, to my knowledge, the only festival anywhere in the world about the grisly execution of a mercenary who attempted to blow up the government. And as the Brits light up their bonfires this year to commemorate an explosive situation in parliament four centuries ago, their former colony has their own eruption of political powder kegs in the form of the always-aggravating Presidential Election.
The campaigning this time has made this out to be essentially a referendum on Donald Trump, who has been painted to be far more evil (and far more competent!) than we have any reason to believe from his previous term in office. Pragmatically, however, this election is amounting to a referendum on the excesses of the current administration. Many folks are voting red not out of any liking for Trump, but because they’ve had enough of what they unknowingly brought about with the Biden-Harris ticket. This bizarre circumstance makes this election even more ridiculous than usual, but you have to give it to the United States - they know how to host a big event!
Since there won’t be much call for it after the fact, I’ve taken all the electorally-adjacent stories from the November Bazaar and delivered them early, for your elucidation and amusement.
Bezos’ Bombshell
If you’d ever suggested to me that I might share something by Jeff Bezos, I would have looked at you with unbounded scepticism. But his Editorial in The Washington Post (which he owns) on 28th October 2024 is a curious event! It follows from the paper declining to endorse either candidate, which shocked the Post’s readers (many of whom cancelled their subscriptions in disgust).
In this extraordinary missive from billionaire world, Bezos claims this decision is principled. Here’s how the editorial begins:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.
I suspect this is half true, as I imagine pragmatic considerations were a larger factor here, but it is still fascinating to see a concession of this kind from a newspaper that has been very far from the pursuit of the truth recently. It’s also interesting that Bezos uses ‘voting machines’ as an analogy here…
Foreign Interference
Remember all the fuss about Russia interfering with that previous election…? More than fifty intelligence community members wrote a letter swearing to it, although it later transpired to be a complete fib and literally nobody was disciplined about it. Fun times. Now it’s the Brits who are engaging in election interference!
Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi share the bizarre story of how cronies allied to our awful British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer are literally coming to the US to interfere with the election. It’s not clear to me if this is illegal or just gob-smackingly rude, but judge for yourself in this two-part piece “British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’” and “British Censorship Group to be ‘Investigated From All Angles’”.
The ‘Nazi Rally’
News coverage of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally was hilariously bad. MSNBC even had the gall to cut from it to archive footage of a historic Nazi rally there in 1939, which surely must win some sort of prize for propaganda (is there already a way to win a ‘proppy’…?). Quite against all the desperate talespin, reports I read from attendees were about as far from National Socialism as could be imagined.
In this regard, I was particularly amused by this tongue-in-cheek piece by Russian-British satirist and social commentator Konstantin Kisin entitled “My Shocking Report from Inside Trumps Nazi Rally”. I’ve never been much a fan of Kisin, to be honest, but I like to read broadly and he leans rightward while not having any particular stake in this race (since, like me, he doesn’t get a vote in it), which gives him a unique perspective.
Writing in a different piece about undecided voters (who he went to speak to while on this side of the pond) Kisin wrote this intriguing summary: “many undecideds see Kamala as having a high probability of relatively low-impact negative events, while Trump carries a very low probability of a high-impact negative event.” That piece has a paywall, so I haven’t shared it, but I thought that quote interesting.
Partisanship Run Amok
This is a good time to remind everyone about the fervour that has recently developed for ‘debanking’, by which an unfavoured political or cultural figure can be literally prevented from participating in society by removing access to their bank account. I watched it happen in the United Kingdom to my disgust, it is no less reprehensible in the United States, as this report by Rupa Subramanya of The Free Press entitled “The Debanking of America” hopefully makes clear.
Misrepresenting ‘Democracy’
“Can the 2024 US Elections Save Democracy?” by Matthew Gasda in Café Américain is one of the more clear-eyed pieces about the political problems in the US I’ve read in quite a while. Here’s an extract:
We can’t keep calling the present managed bureaucratic leviathan a “democracy” any more than we can call a clear-cut wasteland a forest. Our task, as citizens and truth-tellers, is to speak plainly about the system we have—a corporate-bureaucratic oligarchy masquerading as representative government—so we can envision what we want.
Some Actual Journalism
I don’t find much journalism these days, as most places that previously delivered the news have now switched to advocacy. So I was pleasantly surprised by Bruno Maçães’ piece in The New Statesman entitled “Letter from Michigan: ‘No one I know is voting for Kamala Harris’”. (There’s a paywall, but it won’t trigger if this is your first time at their site.) Highly recommended if you don’t understand why people might vote for Trump, or if you think that Trump might be the devil incarnate and not just an obnoxious loudmouth.
Puppies and Kittens
Finally, this is a story from back in August but it makes a perfect end to this Bonfire Bazaar. It seems there is a town in Michigan where the Mayor is always a dog… except this year, when (scandalously) it’s a horse. Check out Eric Spitznagel’s Free Press story that is easily the most fun you’ll have with an election this month.
More thoughts on this year’s electoral debacle in Tuesday’s Stranger Worlds.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Another Bazaar - covering more or less everything but the US election! - should be on its way in mid-November, assuming the planet survives that long.
