I am consumed by the implication that I am not the equivalent of a corporation, but a corporation is the equivalent of me.

I sift through the facts, searching for reason. But some of the dispassionate information I consume, in regard to corporate electioneering, seems specifically devised to circumcise my imagination – much like the world I open my eyes in each morning.

Unlike a corporation, I have a voice that leaves my mouth with the ability to enter your ears. Even the silence of this page is comprehendible. I assume I am free to speak my mind, but nothing is free. Everything and everybody has already been bought. The presidents on currency are smirking. Wrapped in bifolds and trifolds, they lounge in back pockets, zipper pouches and vaults.

I have no mass bank account with which I can buy the way things ought to be. Yet, like I said, a corporation is equivalent to me. Isn’t the not-so-new legislation (Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee), which allows unlimited corporate expenditure for political aspiration just the answer to that age-old problem of “how do we buy and sell them?”

We are living in a disposable era, in what some have called a plastic nation, in a large world growing smaller (technologically speaking). We’ve already sold our freedom and our tradition, which is always siphoned out of society and inserted into history books, where we assume we will find the truth. But looking over our learning children’s shoulders, we just notice more of the lie. Meanwhile, gleaming shopping centers spread across suburban landscapes and from behind our shopping carts we reach for that stylish grey sweater, pushing out of our thoughts images of tiny foreign hands knitting it so their government can afford to purchase our dilapidating republic.

The sound of the incessant media machine murmurs in our minds. Campaign ads endorsing politicians flash across television screens, reflect on blank faces and ooze out of living room windows all across the nation. Those flickering messages imbed themselves into our consciousnesses. And suddenly, when a man and his family are on a stage smirking in the same way those past presidents do on the stacks of cash it took for corporations to elevate this human marionette to power, we wonder which artist’s rendering of him convinced us the most of his deservingness.

Tightening the strings on the wrists, legs and jaw of this forward-thinking mind, formally primed for spokesman-ship, the corporations put policies and promises in his pockets and shine his shoes to perfection. “Don’t worry,” they say. “Thanks to the rabid 24-hour news cycle, it’s all about appearance anyway. We believe in you.”

Nicole Hennessy is a senior magazine journalism major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected] .