I am arriving really late for this dance, I know, but tardiness has long been an integral part of my personal charm. After much deep and serious deliberation and very little research, I came to the conclusion that what the internet really needed was another guy with an opinion. Thus, the development of Cred and Circuses with my friend and co-author Fred. This page is the logical outgrowth of several years of witty (in our opinion) and endless (in the opinion of the rest of our friends) discussions, rants, and observations on politics, sports, politics, music, and politics. You know those two guys in the balcony on the Muppet Show? Well, it’s past admiration and closing in on a life goal.
Stadler: “What’s that frog jabbering about now? Something about a free for all?”
Waldorf: “ No you deaf idiot, he said RECALL!”
Stadler: “Well, Davis hasn’t been such a bad governor.”
Waldorf: “He hasn’t been such a good one either.”
Stadler: “Actually he’s been pretty lousy.”
Waldorf: “Practically criminally negligent….”
Stadler: “He stinks!”
Both: “BOO!!! BOO!!”
You get the idea. Plenty more on the lack of American access to Muppet Show materials later. Suffice it to say it appears to have something to do with the Germans and Mike Eisner. But back to the business at hand….. An old Roman phrase states “Two things only the people anxiously desire - bread and circuses.” The New Dictionary Of Cultural Literacy adds that it has become “a convenient general term for government policies that seek short term solutions to public unrest.” As the dissemination of information has sped up, so too have our public leader’s attempts to offer up solutions to our modern problems. This has placed everybody in a bit of a bind. Politicos used to have the benefit of lag time to consider their options, but that lag time is gone, daddy, gone. Ditto for the spin doctors and the pundits and the expert analysts. Everybody has to make this stuff up on the fly now, and it’s becoming more and more clear that for the first 24 to 48 hours after some major occurrence everyone is just plain guessing. Educated guesses, to be sure, but a lot of this stuff is still falling into the realm of finger crossing.
Here’s where the bind comes in: the modern media now has a precise record of everybody’s first guess, and we get stuck with people having to back up that first impression rather than take the time to find out what the hell is really going on or to determine the best available options. If somebody goes back and changes their mind they get beaten up as indecisive, a flip flopper, and even untrustworthy. Read my lips: once you take a position these days, you’re stuck with it. The result is that our public policies and opinions are potentially being made on the basis of less information than in the past and, additionally, those policy and opinion makers have less flexibility to amend those positions than ever before. Instead of benefiting from all this newfound information availability, we find ourselves being beaten literally senseless with whichever of our own arms usually holds the remote. We’re stuck sifting through a morass of competing truths and end up spitting out knee jerk defenses of our political/cultural/artistic football teams ‘cause we get tired, dude! I mean, after all, there's alot of letters between Alpha and Omega.
So the title of the page comes from that process of checking under the back cushions of the clown car to see if any of our public officials and personalities happened to drop their credibility in the rush for daylight (or spotlight, as the case may be). I'm still sorting it all out, but having a good time while I'm at it. Every author‘s opinion here is their own, and I fully expect to be arguing amongst ourselves relatively quickly. Hope you find it worth checking out and looking forward to your comments.
