{"id":346327,"date":"2018-02-01T13:44:28","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/long-on-theater-short-on-policy\/"},"modified":"2018-02-01T13:44:28","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:44:28","slug":"long-on-theater-short-on-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/long-on-theater-short-on-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Long on Theater, Short on Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_99409\" style=\"max-width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-99409\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/02\/Screen-Shot-2018-01-31-at-4.40.01-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"343\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Fibonacci Blue | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Presidents\u2019 State of the Union speeches used to report on accomplishments of the past year and proposals for new programs and policy changes for the next.\u00a0 Just as the country we once knew, those days are long gone.<\/p>\n<p>In the 21<sup>st<\/sup>\u00a0century the format is mostly theatrical: The president offers a short sentence about how wonderful America is, cuts his sentence short, and waits for applause.\u00a0 The Congress rises and claps longer than the spoken sentence that brought them to their feet.\u00a0 This goes on every 15 seconds. Sometimes less. Up and down, up and down. Turn off the volume, and it\u2019s similar to canned laughter in a TV situation comedy\u2014with the visual effect of bouncing butts replacing the canned laughter.\u00a0 Except it\u2019s all more tragic than it is comedic.<\/p>\n<p>A stranger viewing for the first time must conclude that something anatomically must be wrong with their backsides. Up-down, up-down. But when the incessant pattern of \u2018short phrase, rise and clap too long, sit down\u2019 threatens to become too repetitive, a new theatrical effect is introduced.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s the president introducing staged character actors in the gallery above the floor, each introduction providing an appeal to the tv audience\u2019s emotions.\u00a0 In the Trump speech tonight, there were no fewer than twelve such \u2018gallery scenes\u2019 to break up the mesmerizing stop-rise-clap-sit down nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>First there was \u2018Ashley the helicopter lady\u2019, then \u2018Dolberg the&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/02\/01\/trumps-state-of-the-union-speech-long-on-theater-short-on-policy\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Fibonacci Blue | CC BY 2.0 Presidents\u2019 State of the Union speeches used to report on accomplishments of the past year and proposals for new programs and policy changes for the next.\u00a0 Just as the country we once knew, those days are long gone. In the 21st\u00a0century the format is mostly theatrical: The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-346327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}