Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Page 33 Obit



Buried in an article about ACA we find the first line of the obituary for American journalism:
But most reporting on these numbers has lacked a critical bit of historical context. 
In case you hadn't noticed, most reporting on everything lacks any historical perspective.  Because we have reached the point where dragging history into any conversation about anything important would make most of the people who shine the seats of the Beltway Media swivel chairs look like liars and idiots.

This is me, from a long time ago when I called this phenomenon Meme-ento (an inability to form any new political memories after 1997):
...
I have long entertained the fantasy of taking down the deans and duchesses of the MSM with a trank gun and rendering them off to my own, private “Come To Jesus” camp in the wilds of Hintervania. There they would be shocked, shivered and dosed to their hairplugs with scopolamine until someone explained to me why the entire fucking media has lost its fucking mind.

Why has the Fourth Estate – right before our eyes -- become a bunch of cowardly Fifth Columnists?

Why, when confronted with clear and overwhelming proof of their complicity and gutlessness -- when asked the simple question “Why?” -- do they go all squirmy and twitchy and outraged?

Why do Conservatives get to stand on desks with their hair on fire and shriek the most ludicrous, vile and mendacious hogwhiz – year after year after year after year after motherfucking year -- unchallenged? Why do these same howler monkeys -– who have been not just wrong but spectacularly, catastrophically wrong about everything, every time -- keep getting invited back in front of the cameras and onto the pages of major newspapers?

And when they rise from their crypts yet again to spackle yet another layer of Conservative lies on the wounded world – to send another wave of our kids off to die for no good reason, circle the wagons around another corporate monster, piss another precious pint of what’s left of our nation’s good name down the sewer, tax-cut-and-spend us further into debt – why do the same “journalists” who were ever eager to carve another slice out of Clinton’s ass over trivia, now piss themselves in like puppies in a thunderstorm and hide under the bed as Conservatives rape the truth two feet in front of them and them rub their noses in it?

Why is it that if Dick Cheney were caught sodomizing an underage manatee in the triforium of the National Cathedral, the first three words out of any MSM haircut’s mouth would be, “But the Democrats…”?
...
Later, I started calling it Strategic Forgettery.

It is a strange thing to watch whole swaths of history being effaced out of existence before our eyes.  I think of this as the tragedy of Liberalism -- being doomed to remember all the inconvenient truths that our politics and media Etch-a-Sketch energetically away and then being cursed to argue with crazy people who have no memory of what they themselves purported to believe -- loudly -- only moment ago.

For me personally, this amounts to a 100% certain dead-bang guarantee that the minute I stop stomping around the outskirts of town banging my little tambourine and shouting about Both Sides, everything I have ever written will vanish like the proverbial snowflake in a cyclotron.

Interesting feeling.

4 comments:

D. said...

And "Current Events" is no longer being taught.

I'm beginning to doubt my own memory, which is not good.

Horace Boothroyd III said...

@D Yet everyone can code, which cultivates precisely the mindset and diversity of thought needed by We the People to confront the subtleties of This Modern World.

My memory is not good either, so thank God we have the Oxford Comma to render every sentence unambiguous.

Dan said...

Money does funny things to people.
Add weapons grade fear and you start to see a Republican dynasty

LasvegasJessica said...

"Why is it that if Dick Cheney were caught sodomizing an underage manatee in the triforium of the National Cathedral..." Mwah, ¡perfecto!