If you're ever in the mood for a dark 1960s British comedy that tries a little too hard to be veddy, veddy British, check out Peter Sellers as a mad billionaire in the 1969 flick The Magic Christian. Having determined that he can do whatever the fuck he wants because he's so rich, Sellers, with his adopted son, played, for some reason, by Ringo Starr, fills a vat with pig shit, piss, and blood and tosses wads of cash into it, announcing, "Free money." Well-dressed, proper British men (mostly) come rushing to the vat and hold their noses to get in and gather the bills.
The Rude Pundit thought about this scene when he read the headlines: "Carly Fiorina Added to Koch Brothers' Short List" or "Carly Fiorina Gains Blessing of the Koch Brothers' Dark Money Network" or even "Koch brothers eyeing Marco Rubio for nearly $1B campaign contribution." But he didn't think of it for the reason you might be thinking. Sure, sure, you can easily say that the candidates are the idiots leaping into the piss pool for befouled cash.
But what should bother all of us is the blithe, passive way this information has been given to us, the voting public. We should read something like "Carly Fiorina...has tacitly been acknowledged by multi-billionaires Charles and David Koch through their extended network of political organizations. This means that not only could the big bucks begin flowing from the Koch coffers into Carly’s lightly funded campaign, but it could also attract other heavyweight GOP donors who are still on the fence" and feel blind outrage. It is a flat-out, plain statement that rich fucks are trying to buy the election. It's not that we didn't know already that rich fucks try to buy elections - that's what rich fucks do. But the fact that it's said out in the open, reported, even, by media outlets, without an acknowledgment that something is really, truly, on a basic level fucked up about it says more about the slow death of our democracy than perhaps the act itself.
In other words, like gun massacres, we've become numb to what is truly dangerous in our brain damaged nation simply because it just happens all the goddamn time.
In the Rubio article, the New York Daily News notes, "The big prize — aside from the presidency itself — is still the nearly $1 billion contribution the kingmaking Koch brothers, Charles and David, will reportedly throw behind the conservative agenda next year." And it was not followed with "What a disgusting sham our electoral system has become when two assholes can toss a billion bucks into the pot and get senators and governors and whatever the fuck Fiorina is to lick the waxy folds of their balls clean."
Seriously, no one gives a shit. And that's where The Magic Christian comes back into play. "A bit literal," says Ringo Starr about the money in the feces and urine pool. But maybe not. Because, see, maybe the point here isn't that candidates will wallow around in wretched effluvia to scrape campaign funds together. That is quite on the nose. Maybe, instead, we voters are the ones in the pool because, ultimately, we're the people who are content to dip into the shit pond to choose our candidates. It's especially true of Republicans this time around, but Hillary ain't clean.
We should read those headlines and the many, many more like them and not just shrug. The oligarchy wins when the masses are taught not to care.
