Modern corporate media is a truly sick distillery of democracy's raw grain of pure information, a maddening moonshine machine to rival even Marshall McLuhan's worst dystopian nightmares. Fully demonstrating the inherent incompetence of the corporate governance model, said distillery churns out not absinthe, but rather, rotgut, in quantities to rival even Rupert Murdoch's most lurid fantasies of acquisitional overkill.

Evidence of such overpour was on absurd display on April 16 in Pennsylvania, when a particular pair of pundits, apparently attempting to distill that evening's crucial presidential candidate debate--democratic in both the small-d and big-D senses--into sublimely spectacular swill, merely dragged the democratic drama into spectacular pathos. As widely lamented the next day across the Web, ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, despite their best efforts at fishing for "gotcha," drew audience ire and fire not towards the candidates, but rather upon themselves, as well as the modern corporate media for which they stood so spectacularly that evening.

Please note that the word "spectacular" as used here is not exactly a positive modifier. Rather it refers to the notion of "the spectacle," first identified and described in The Society of the Spectacle, the crucial revolutionary tract published in 1967 by Guy Debord, anti-leader of the Situationist International, the obscure-yet-influential group of ideological gadflies whose ideas greatly fueled the historic Paris upheaval of May 1968. In Society's 221 terse yet sophisticated theses, Debord reported brilliantly on, among other post-Hiroshima phenomena, the emerging story of how modern corporate media, then still struggling out of its cocoon, had already enabled a mass alienation to rival even that described in Karl Marx's fertile interpretation of the state of the world back in the 1848 day.

"The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord wrote in 1967, "but rather a social relation among people, mediated by images." Among the spectacle's many functions as an instrument of modern capitalism, according to Debord, it served to alienate people, not merely from their own labor, but also from their actual and urgent problems as members of modern society--in no small part by providing a mediated myriad of distractions from the actual and urgent. "The spectacle," Debord continued, pages later, "is the guardian of sleep."

Here in 2008, as the spectacle, enabled by the likes of CNN, Fox News and, last but not least, ABC News, continues to maddeningly metastasize, further supporting evidence for Debord's vision can be seen in the way such prime time red meat as Barack Obama's alleged terrorist connections and Hillary Clinton's alleged cleavage serve to distract the electorate, and the electoral discourse, from such matters as global warming, economic meltdown, the quagmire in Iraq, and the now-emerging global food crisis.

The Society of the Spectacle was not the only arcane radical tract from the 1960s to covertly haunt the pathetic punditry in Pennsylvania this year. The Port Huron Statement, published in 1962 as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, was also inadvertently invoked in the April 16 debate when George Stephanopoulos attempted, by mentioning Barack Obama's flimsy acquaintance with a certain William Ayers, to paint Obama as a possible terrorist sympathizer. Ayers, of course, was once a member of the Weather Underground, the brilliant mistake that emerged from the implosion of SDS in 1969. Once a fugitive, Ayers is now a respected University of Chicago professor and liberal activist; Obama visited Ayers's home in 1995 to attend a local politico meet-and-greet for his emerging campaign for Illinois state senator; both have naturally orbited the same Chicago political circles ever since. Stephanopoulos's attempted swiftboating based on this inevitable association has apparently only served to revive mainstream interest in the Weather Underground, and thus, potentially, SDS and its intriguing origins in the American Camelot, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf Incident.

And so it seems the American Right, as its turn to implode slowly unfolds, is now making brilliant mistakes of its own. Let's now recall how, in 1980, as Bill Ayers and his Weather co-star Bernardine Dohrn were turning themselves in after a decade in hiding, the American Right began to passionately and, yes, effectively strangle the positive legacies of the 1960s. Heckuva way to finish the job in 2008: introduce the impressionable young idealists of Obamatime (at least those not already on board the clue train) to the institutional memory of Students for a Democratic Society, by way of the long-withered Weatherman. If, as a result of the spectacularly klutzy tango of Stephanopoulos and Gibson on April 16, some dog-eared copy of The Port Huron Statement should soon fall into the hands of the wrong impressionable 19-year-old, God forbid, the 1960s may very soon really be starting all over again. (Let the front-page epitaph read: Reagan Revolution Fatally Shoots Self While Cleaning Rifle.)

And so, the American conservative movement begun in 1980 continues to slowly choke to death on its own vomit. Would it be too much to ask for the spectacle, whose foreboding shadow sparked the beginnings, at least, of yet another popular revolution in Paris forty years ago this month, to commit to a similar fate? The outpouring of outrage over the spectacular pathos exhibited by ABC News on April 19 (within 24 hours of the debate, the ABC News website had received nearly 19,000 comments criticizing the debate's tenor and moderators) holds out hope that the American electorate, as well as being sick of The War and its architects, may also be sick of the spectacle, even if only unconsciously.

In other words, if the spectacle is truly "the guardian of sleep," perhaps the American public is beginning at long last to wake up, American Idol notwithstanding. Guy Debord, who passed away on Nov. 30, 1994 from a sadly self-inflicted shotgun wound, possibly inspired by a deep sense of ideological defeat, may or may not still be rolling in his grave.