I’ve had this theory for a long time about how people can wind-up worshipping at the feet of an evil empire while continuing to believe that they’re free. I think it happens in much the same way the nation no longer knows what a strawberry tastes like but still thinks that’s what it’s eating.

My earliest years in this happy incarnation were spent in Madison, Wisconsin, that mythical town where a lot of progressive impulses have flourished for better than a hundred years and where both Robert LaFollette and Wayne Morse were born. My immigrant grandfather owned a very large shipping operation for fresh produce, and I used to hang around the warehouses on Saturday mornings while my Dad did whatever dads do as maybe heirs-apparent at the in-laws’ operations. There were guys carrying enormous loads of bananas on their backs and the air was one part fruits and vegetables and one part cigar and cigarette smoke.

One of the many perks in this situation was the opportunity to ingest pretty much as many strawberries as I could manage, which was a lot. God, they were sweet.

But those strawberries are mostly gone now. Sure, you can locate the real thing at a farmers’ market, just as you can locate the last vestige of free and independent media if you’ve got two hundred channels, or navigate the web, and happen to catch Rachel Maddow or Gene Robinson or Keith Olbermann.

People still think they are buying strawberries at Safeway, and they think they’re getting a spectrum of political news from networks like CNN, where Wolf Blitzer and other assorted airheads give viewers an entire range of opinion, from conservative to fascist. Ann Coulter. I mean, what’s missing? A fireside chat with Adolph Hitler?

If you take a color, say ‘blue’, and change it a little bit each day, just a little, hardly noticed by a distracted, gullible citizenry, eventually ‘blue’ will be solid red. It might be called ‘democracy’ instead of ‘blue’.

Okay, you know all of this. You also know that the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Hillary Clinton have each been run by people whose profession is that of lobbyist. Well, what’s so strange about that?

Presidential campaigns have changed through history. Until the mid-nineteen hundreds they were run by party hacks, the Karl Rove types who knew how to apply a bit of muscle when and where required. JFK’s manager was his brother, Robert, and his top guys were personal friends such as Larry O’Donnell. Nixon’s races were run by public relations experts. Jimmy Carter had his own people, Hamilton Jordan, and pollster Pat Caddell.

In the 1980s, beginning with Reagan, big money began to assert itself. The people running campaigns became, transparently, the interface between money and operations. We own you, the corporations were saying, and we’re putting our own people in charge.

Now we’ve got lobbyists running campaigns whose agencies received payments –– from Lockheed-Martin, pharamaceutical and insurance companies, telecommunications giants such as AT&T –– in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Let that register for a minute...

Then consider that the way it works is that a corporation will expect to receive through these lobbyists government contracts or tax breaks worth maybe a hundred-times that much. You need not apply advanced arithmetic to the situation.

There is only one possible interpretation of this. And yet Americans, blinded by the media’s bullshit and their own laziness, will have voted in the millions for candidates who are in bed with corporate criminals such as Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and AT&T.

It’s crazy, but people keep calling these things ‘strawberries’.