Bill and Hillary Klingon’s Happy Homespun Homilies

Take a warped drive to what really may be the final frontier

To be fair, I only heard about five minutes of Bill’s Ode to Hillary on the radio last night, and then Hillary’s gushing closing remarks, while she was apparently surrounded and embraced by adoring children. It struck me as a very masterful exercise in emotional button pushing, a classic bit of hypnosis and hype by a master storyteller and serial adulterer; a proven winning combination.

While Bill’s certainly skillful enough to weave tall tales, I would imagine they spared no expense in acquiring the talents of expert consultants to make sure that every possible note on the piper’s pipes would be played, well calculated to ensnare the females in the audience with appeals designed to bypass critical thinking and manipulate their familial, maternal, and/or other sentiments.

Strangely, the homespun homilies and touching tales were devoid of details about, let alone mention of, anything concerning the Clinton Foundation’s involvement in what some consider highly questionable financial transactions with human rights suppressing regimes. Nor did I, in those few minutes, hear a word about disappeared emails or their various collected scandals.

Now I just took a break from writing this and saw that there were a number of commentaries online from people who’d seen the entire…performance, so I’ll only add this.

Playing to the American fascination with the cult of personality, the Klingons cloak themselves in the preposterous political polyester of being people-of-the-people. Borrowing from the magician’s (or is it pickpocket’s?) handbook, they want us to “look at this hand” while ignoring the one over there, picking everyone’s pockets…while categorically denying it.

Bill bathes the audience in emotional balm – your eyelids are getting heavy, heavier – and subtlety but implicitly plays the…entitlement card; Hillary deserves to be president, all reasoning aside.

We’re offered the choice between a candidate who wants us to put ethics, morality and reasoning aside and transfer the pull on our heartstrings to pulling the lever for more war, or the hot-shot, reality show businessman who views the whole thing as another negotiation, a deal to close and more bounty to be won. If that doesn’t work out too well for the country, if people get Trumpled in the process, I guess we can talk to his lawyers.

To bastardize yet more from Gene Rodenberry, as we take this warped drive to what really may be the final frontier, to the candidates I say, “May the Farce be with you”, and to all the rest of us, “Live long and…perspire”.

See also:

An Apology to the Pigs

Bill and Hillary Klingon’s Happy Homespun Homilies originally appeared on They Fly Blog on July 27, 2016.