Is it possible for banality to reach such a stage of perfection that what was merely a kind of numbing vacuity crosses over into the realm of the sublime? Panning across the vicious candy on view in the display case of a post-spectacular mediascape the question is inevitable. Where once somebody intuited a presence beneath that surface– the pale grub of self-interest writhing poisonously under culture’s transgenic leafage– now exists pure absence, a condition of such staggering insignificance that by comparison the insouciant nihilism of pop songs like “Less Than Zero” seem to possess the irresistable tonnage of spiritual redemption. 

Item. The mind-annihilating boredom of listening to conversations weighing the relative merits of Hill or Obama. Should she cash out? Does his wife hate America? What’s a super delegate? Bearing witness to these exchanges takes on a wrenching pathos usually provoked by watching a maimed animal attempting to right itself. What has been broken can never be fixed and neither speaker understands how complete is their incapacity. They continue to struggle back to their feet unaware that conditions have deteriorated so drastically that death will be a kind of mercy. In this scenario political speech empties itself of political significance not through any fault of the speakers but because the situation itself admits to no meaning. “There is no there there” it could be said, and what’s worse no here here either.

Counter-item. Once we could take comfort in bits of language collected at random from film, conversation and literature. Benicio del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects would be a ripe example, as when Fenster, pressed for information, leaned on hard by the cops, remarks of the man in question, Gabriel Byrne’s Keaton, “He’ll flip ya. Flip you for real.” Mere text can’t do the phrase justice; this fragment persists as a sound-byte mimicked by thousands of reasonably bright undergraduates perhaps one of whom has managed to hit the right intonation. Which isn’t to say del Toro’s a genius, unless genius is purely a product of chance and slovenly elocution. There is no context in which the sound-byte could be inappropriate: toasting the groom, watching the court house burn, releasing a bong hit, listening to Tony Fratto defend torture. Any and all occasions are enhanced by the utterance precisely because it has no value.