Have you ever wondered what politicians do with all that campaign finance money? They don’t keep it (or at least not most of it). They spend it. On campaigning. A lot of it on advertising. Which means buying time and space in the media. Including the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

That media is not going to bite the hand that feeds it, is it? So, it’s a bit rich when a columnist scolds a citizen for taking a “meaningless flight of fancy.” What would Marsha Mercer do?

Labelling Doug Hughes’s gyrocopter flight “meaningless” is what Mercer did. So we don’t really need to ask what she “would” do. The job of the media is to spin and frame dissent as either trivial or terroristic. In an oligarchy, all dissent is either trivial or it is terror. Thus, by definition, no dissent can be “meaningful” in the sense of being both effectual and legitimate.

This is precisely the eye of the needle that Hughes threaded with his marvelous stunt. Superficially, it is about oligarchy and corruption of democracy by big money. But more profoundly — and metaphorically — it is about the hermetically-sealed “closed air space” over Washington. D.C. In his letter to all 535 members of Congress, Hughes quoted John Kerry on the corrosion of money in politics and it’s contribution to “the justifiable anger of the American people. They know it. They know we know it. And yet nothing happens.”

Kerry went on to point out how the corruption of money in politics “muzzles more Americans than it empowers.” How does it do this? Well, for one, those same media outlets that profit from the spending of that corrupting money to buy advertising space also get to pass judgment on the wisdom or folly of dissenting speech: “Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down! Sit down, you’re rocking the boat!”

We need a lot more than campaign finance reform. We do not need minders and muzzlers from the media to tell us what is “meaningful” and what is not.