Sunday, before lunch, I decided to drive around what's left of the old Sunday Morning political teevee show side of town and let's just say you don't want to find yourself stranded there overnight.
What was once a bustling neighborhood of wide boulevards and grand estates is now a bombed-out wasteland of weeds, trash and things with glittery red eyes skulking in the shadows. If you drive by very quickly and squint very hard you can still sort of make out the edges of its former glory, but one blink and you're back in the here-and-now: block after block of smashed windows, crumbling credibility, fading crime-scene chalk outlines of Bill Monroe and David Brinkley and rusty Neoconservative hulks up on cinder-blocks, stripped down to their chassis.
If you're new to the area, you the persistence of the existence of the place is an immediate and vexiting mystery. It's toxic dump, so how can people still live there? It's a breeding ground for cultural vandals and intellectual looters, so why hasn't the sheriff rolled in hard with a bunch of his shiny, new Homeland Security toys and evicted the worst offenders? It sits on some prime teevee real estate, so why aren't citizens and developers both demanded that this reeking news desert be rezoned and torn down so they can put up something finer?
Just across the parking, urban pioneers like "Up with Chris Hayes" and "The Melissa Harris-Perry Show" have demonstrated on a small scale that, with a lot of integrity and sweat equity, poison land can be reclaimed, restored and remade into a viable, sustainable community. The blueprints are in the public domains, so why not just do that on a larger scale?
The answer, of course, is that just like any other destructive street drug, slingin' that Centrist rock is crazy profitable!
As this quaint exchange between two CBS executives from the early Reagan Era demonstrates, in the old days there was a gentlemen's agreement about letting this shit run wild --
DON CORLEONE:
My friends, I didn't refuse out of malice. You all know me. When have I ever refused an accommodation? But why, this time? Because I think this drug business will destroy us in the years to come. It's not like whiskey or gambling or even women which most people want and is forbidden them by the pezzonovante of the Church and the Government. But Centrism? No. Even policemen, who help us in gambling and other things would refuse to help us in drugs. But...I am willing to do whatever all of you think is necessary.
DON ZALUCHI:
I don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business...$200 a week. But it didn't matter. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have "Both Sides Do It", if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing." Who can resist such a profit? There's no way to control it, as a business...to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children. That is an infamita...
-- but it was only a matter of time before the terrible price that came with Centrism's amazing profits overwhelmed all social and ethical constraints.
The reason the sheriff and the developers do nothing is that the sheriff and the developers are employees of the Centrist cartel now.
The reason citizens are not up in arms about this open, running media sewer is that they are too busy lining up around the block to buy the sweet, narcotic Centrist dream the dealers are selling.
The reason vampires like George Will and rodents like David Brooks thrive is because, in a drug culture, the truth dies first.
And so, with the cops and chamber of commerce on the payroll and the suburban citizenry safely anesthetized, Gregory the Enforcer
is free to say shit like this any time anyone even hints at getting twitchy about Centrism being the answer to every single fucking question:
And it's — and it's — unfortunately, it's kind of a bipartisan deterioration.
And nobody -- nobody! -- say a word, because everyone clearly understands what happens to anyone who is not a team player.
2 comments:
"Also in 2010, Taibbi wrote that Brooks works "as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are."
New ways??
Me, reading Tom Friedman's latest bowel movement:
"And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple..."
Wait - Tom "Suck On This" Friedman has learned a lesson from Iraq? I never thought I would see that in a million Friedman Units!
"You can’t go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America."
Oh. Nevermind...
Help us, Driftglass; you're our only hope.
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