As George Carlin said, the big joke relies on us rubes believing we have a choice when it comes to selecting politicians who "truly represent us" and not to the powers at be who fund their endless campaigns. The big joke also applies to banks "too big to fail" getting bailed out by us when making bad investments as there's no consequences whenever these entities make bad decisions like that of pols lying to the public about Viet Nam or banks selling options on toxic assets before the housing bubble burst in 2008. In indirect fashion, this big joke applies to The Donald's big lie as seen by the blurb below.
Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.
The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.
When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.
Orwell's take also rings true regarding the joke in his classic essay Politics and the English language
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
We pretend to work, you pretend to pay us
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