"Mr. Speaker, Mr. Majority Leader, thank you for inviting me here tonight to discuss the state of our union. The state of our union is strong, and it's all because of me, motherfkers, and no thanks to your sorry, wrinkled white asses. I did everything I could do to pull the economy out of the shallow grave your deregulatory frenzy and the two-term nitwit who preceded me dug for it. You stood there like squeaking eunuchs and blocked everything you could, and a narrow slice of the electorate gave you virtually unprecedented control over the entire national legislature. I don't care. Your party has sold its soul and lost its mind. I'm not going anywhere. So I'm'a gonna do what I goddamn well please, because the state of our union is strong, motherfkers, and it's all because of me. Nice to see you all again, though."

Unless the speech begins that way, I really don't care about it. 'Fi were king of the forest, there wouldn't even be a State Of The Union address, much less the full-dress exercise in political Mardi Gras that it has become. (Another thing for which we can thank that overrated maniac, Woodrow Wilson.) 'Twere up to me, presidents would go back to sending letters up to Capitol Hill, and they would use the present three-day run-up as kind of an all-star break from being president. Beer pong at Camp David! Now, though, thanks to the fact that television -- and especially its cable-news aspects -- is the index patient for institutional elephantiasis, there is nothing more inconsequential (and marginally loathsome) than the SOTU, and my use of the stupid acronym embarrasses me. It is just another television show. It's an Event for the sake of being an Event, the White House Correspondents Dinner in Founding Father drag. Worse, it's just another television extravaganza. It has more in common with the Super Bowl than with anything else, beginning with the fact that the SOTU (Make it stop!) Pregame Show began at about seven o'clock this morning, and that the Postgame analysis will go on well into the whiskey hours of the early morning. The State Of The Union and its attendant ballyhoo is now the clearest evidence we have that American self-government, and the politics that are at its heart, has become an ongoing piece of audience-participation performance art that has very little to do with the actual power in the country, and whose wielding it, and for what purposes. The only real mystery to the thing any more is whether the president delivering the speech is Punch or Judy.

In times of serious crisis, of which this is not one, no matter how much the folks in market research at CNN would like it to be, the speech might serve a purpose as both national sermon and national pep talk. By and large, however, the institutional barriers to any president's actually accomplishing anything by his participation in this annual dumbshow are insurmountable. The whole production is based on a phony bonhomie that any thinking primate knows is completely counterfeit. Look at the uproar that rose when this president called out the Supreme Court justices for their role in drowning the political system with corporate money. My dear young man, this simply is not done. (Joe Wilson was incredibly rude, but his moment in the sun was a pretty authentic one.) In this case, for example, none of the president's policy initiatives have a snowball's chance on Qatar of passing this Congress, and that includes the ones that were thought up by Republicans like the departed Dave Camp. A return to the capital-gains rate passed by Ronald Reagan is a non-starter. (Me? I'm still of the belief that we should roll back the Reagan tax cuts entirely.) He knows it. They know it. He will propose it in the name of "getting things done" or "doing the job the American people expect us to do," and nobody will believe he or the members of the audience in the chamber have either the power or the will to do anything of the sort. It will be comical to listen to the commentary after the speech. It will be comical to watch the in-house "dial groups" on the various cable networks. It will be like watching people divine the future by flights of birds.

There is one exception to all of this, and it is an exception that can prove perilous to this country and, therefore, to the rest of the world. Given the events of the past few weeks in Europe, we are in the middle of one of our completely predictable national spasms of blind panic, which the usual suspects will carefully cultivate and nurture until they produce the war for which the usual suspects are itching. Fox is, of course, off the charts on this, but CNN has become completely loathsome over the past several weeks as well, stacking its panels with ex-colonels and terrorism "experts," and conflating ISIS and al Qaeda and Boko Haram into one seamless, shapeless monster until the impulse simply to lash out may well become irresistible. (The massive box-office receipts for American Sniper over the weekend are testimony to nothing more than the fact that the American audience wants another war it can watch on the electric teevee machine.) If this president, or any president, wants to deliver a message that will garner "bipartisan" applause, and that will bring the country together, then, sadly, the more bellicose he is in his speech, the better off he will be. The White House must be sorely tempted to play this card. It is devoutly to be hoped that someone there looking very much like Barack Obama, and wearing his socks, can resist it.

(BTW, live blogging will ensue shortly before the speech and continue for some time afterwards. Shebeen will be open late for comments and poitin. And, if I opened a Canadian-Irish restaurant called "Poutine and Poteen," would people come to it? Just asking.)

Otherwise, it's all dumbshow, "content" thrown across "many platforms," as the distressing jargon of modern communications technology would have it. Send a letter, Mr. President, Send it postage due.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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