PAC Man

If you happen to be a geek, or know one well, you may know that the Japanese company, Namco, created one of the first arcade games, known as Pac-Man. Arcade games, once transitioned into an electronic digital media environment, were the first video games. Pac-Man was a rudimentary eating-head (as opposed to "head-eating") icon. It preceded the talking heads idea (which was pioneered by the Sci-Fi character known as Max Headroom and which came to symbolize today's "talking heads") by decades.

Today's PAC Man is a professional advocate for a political party, interest group, government entity, NGO or individual. He (or, in some instances, she) is well symbolized by some combination of Pac-Man and Max Headroom, for reasons which should not escape the notice of those who have been paying attention to postmodern political theater.

Sometimes PACs derive their names from existing acronyms, such as GOPAC (as derived from the Grand Old Party, or GOP, the affectionate name for the Republican Party). In actuality, of course, GOPAC is a PAC only in an expanded sense of the term, since its primary target is not a working politician, but young people who aspire to be working politicians. You could think of GOPAC as a politician-incubator for liberal Republicans, but you wouldn't want to refer to them as P-INCos for obvious reasons. The second reason for eschewing that expression is, of course, that today's liberal Republican was yesterday's conservative, albeit with an Alinsky-ite perspective on partisanship. (Saul Alinsky is the noted community organizer who wrote Rules for Radicals, which inspired the current generation of Progressive activists. Historians, of course, will recognize that Alinsky's tactics can be traced back at least to George Orwell's classic work of political fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was, in turn, inspired – in a negative sense – by the efforts of propaganda pioneers like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels. Indeed, the home page of this website cites Orwell's fictional propagandist, Syme, a friend of his protagonist Winston Smith, in the ironically named "Ministry of Truth".)

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have official college wings which serve to incubate new recruits. The RNC founded the College Republican National Committee (or CRNC) in 1892, although today it operates as a separated incubator. The DNC founded the College Democrats of America (or CDA) in 1932, although it, too, split from its parent organization (during LBJ's Viet Nam War). The closest thing I've been able to identify as a Democrat analog to GOPAC is Democracy for America (or DFA), the Progressive incubator founded by Howard Dean, or the George Soros funded organization, the Center for American Progress (or CAP), though CAP more resembles the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute.

Both political parties have quasi-independent media watchdogs. Republicans have the Media Research Center (or MRC) while Democrats have Media Matters for America (or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Matters_for_America MMfA]). Numerous self-proclaimed fact-check organizations have arisen to attempt to "correct the record" whenever something is "spun" in the media. These, too, are creative offshoots of political action committees.

Everybody who's anybody seems to have a political action committee, these days, even, perhaps, the party of globalists (otherwise known as the POG, or the GOP through the looking glass - I figure that's more dignified than referring to them as POD people, even though they're known colloquially as the Party of Davos, the Swiss ski resort where the World Economic Forum meets in the winter). It occurred to me that since Davos is a favorite ski resort of the jumbo-jet set, they might adopt the name SNOW-PAC (SNOW, of course, being an acronym for Swissified Narcissistic Oligarchs of the World — I kinda like the name SNOW-PAC. It hints broadly at its main function.).

For an extensive list of PACs, see List of Political Action Committees (on Wikipedia).