Civic Theater, With Smoke

 

Civic Theater, With Smoke 

By BR Wilson, Guitars & Cigars- The Political Patriot

There’s a smell to American politics now. I mean that literally. Not rot exactly, no, not clean rot you can point at, more like old smoke, stale beer, something electrical burning behind the wall where nobody wants to cut it open and look. It sits in the room. Gets in your clothes. You leave, you still carry it.

Confidence though Christ, we’ve got barrels of that. Spilling out of microphones, sweating through TV panels, dripping down your phone like something you shouldn’t touch but do anyway. Everybody certain. Loud certain. The kind of certain that doesn’t need proof, just volume.

Used to be debate. Now it’s theater. Not even the good kind, the kind where somebody might forget a line and tell the truth by accident. No, this is tight. Rehearsed. Outrage hits its mark like a cue light. You can feel it coming half a sentence early… there it is… applause. Every time.

The politicians, yeah, 

they don’t solve problems. They inventory them.

Tag ‘em. Polish ‘em. Put ‘em back on the shelf for the next cycle.

God forbid something actually gets fixed… what would they talk about then? Weather? Silence? No market for that.

And the media… I don’t even know if “lying” fits anymore. Lying takes effort. This is just… arrangement. Cropping the picture till it behaves. Loop it, loop it again, loop it till it feels like truth or at least something close enough you stop checking. Like hearing a song through a wall, eventually you just accept the version you get.

People, my people, good people, mostly, 

they’re tired. You can see it in the pauses. In the way conversations stall out right before they turn into something ugly. But they still get handed sides like it’s lunch meat at a counter. “You’re this now.” “No, you’re that.” Take a number. Defend it. Don’t look behind the glass.

And yeah… it gets in you. Don’t kid yourself. You feel it. That hum. Like a bad transformer buzzing just above your head. You catch yourself repeating something you heard three hours ago like it’s yours. It ain’t. But there it is, already unpacked, sitting in your mouth.

Call it what it is, it’s a shit show.

But not sloppy. That’s the trick.

It runs clean. Too clean. Lights hit right. Sound carries. Nobody trips over the cables. That’s not failure. That’s design.

Still, 

and this part feels almost illegal to say out loud, 

there’s another country tucked under all that noise. Not gone. Just… quieter. Harder to see if you’re looking straight at it.

Back porches. Late nights. Somebody hands you a drink, doesn’t ask what you think about anything except maybe the weather, and even that’s optional. A guy fixes something for somebody else and forgets to mention it later. No angle. No clip. No “watch till the end.”

It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t explain itself.

It just… keeps happening, and it feels real in a way the rest of this doesn’t. Almost uncomfortable. Like silence after a siren shuts off and your ears don’t know what to do with it.

Everything else keeps rolling. Same lines. Same beats. New faces trying on old anger like it still fits. Somebody’s always shouting like it’s the first time it’s been said, like nobody remembers last Tuesday.

The crowd, yeah, the crowd, 

they’re still there.

Maybe they like it.

Maybe they don’t.

Maybe it’s just easier than walking out into the dark and figuring out what comes next without a script.

Hell if I know.

But that smell?

Still there.