Essay? Fiction? Who knows.

Two sets of jowls flop at each other on the television. Old white jowls, spotted with age and bouncing with the vigor that only violent disagreement can imbue them with. The names, time, and channel are largely irrelevant., a depressing fact. I sit, mesmerized, almost completely oblivious to the bullshit they spit at each other, chunks of predigested meat no doubt memorized from the morning fax from the national machinery, and I wonder about the men attached to those jowls. Do they head out for old single barrel scotch after the taping? Do their wives know each other? When you take on the job of mouthpiece, are you required to actually believe the garbage you profess to believe on television? No one in the illusory world of television is real I imagine. Politicians hold press conferences to race bait or gay bash or question intellectualism, then go back to their offices staffed by homosexual black PhDs. Preachers command huge audiences and collect tithes, looking the camera straight in the eye, compelling the old and poor to submit to Jesus and his work, gold flashing from the hands and wrists protruding from the ends of their Armani suit jackets, surgically perfect shaved teeth glistening in the studio lights. And the audiences buy right into it. Actors become the characters they portray, embodying the virtues and vices of their fictional likenesses. Supreme Court justices quote action dramas in legal arguments. Accepting the illusion is easy. I suppose that’s the heart of it. Truth is hard, it takes time to uncover, effort to pan for it in the mud of personal viewpoint and interpretation. How much easier to accept the visible, the spoken, the broadcast.