One by one, they've all fallen off my list. No longer do I have Morning Edition on in the morning. Rarely can I stand to listen to The Connection, or Talk of the Nation--which I stuck through even when Juan Williams was the host. I cling to Terry Gross, the BBC, but find myself more and more often listening to the hardcore punk on WMBR or Renaissance polyphony on my iPod. All thanks to the infiltration of hard-right perspectives, which have become "mainstream" simply because, even though a minority of Americans ascribe to it, the same ideology now occupies the seat of power in Washington. Ideas that deserve nothing but derisive snorts of contempt are treated as worthy of genuine consideration, not because a majority of Americans favor them, but because the people who DO favor them have seized power.
Well okay. I've learned to live with that.
But recently, this much more difficult phenomenon. This inability to tolerate even good news--stories that indicate some gleam of light still shines in the descending darkness. For instance....
Dear Mr. Speaker:
We, the undersigned former intelligence officials in the U.S. intelligence community, request that you launch an immediate, bipartisan congressional investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media that exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame's name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security....
linkAs recently as a few months ago, this might have filled me with sufficient hope to sleep on, whatever new neocon horrors the light of morning brought on. But now it just fills me with a feeling of feckless despair. A letter to Dennis
Hastert? Are you
dreaming??? There was a time--I laugh now, to think on it--when the idea would have entered my brain, "Well, I mean, these rightwingers pretend to care about things like what the military and the intelligence services actually think; let's see 'em chew on that one for a while." But now.... I mean, Dennis f'r cripesake
Hastert? He no more cares about REAL national security and treason in the White House than an anaconda in the deepest swamps of the Amazon cares about the price of a can of 30-weight in the automotive aisle at WalMart. Might as well have sent this letter to Santa Clause.
Or consider yesterday's headline in the Boston Globe:
Infiltration of files seen as extensive: Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats.
Anyone remember the amount of stink raised about "file-gate"? Here's something a thousand times worse than that, and orders of magnitude more demonstrably nefarious than the Watergate break-in. Shock? Legs? Follow up?
I think the NYTimes covered it, but it wasn't featured on their homepage, even as a link under "Nation" or "Politics."
Oh yes, here it is. Great headline too:
"Senate Inquiry Into Memos That Went Astray Nears End""Memos that went astray." Yup. All by themselves. Who knows what happened? Those darn memos! They just, y'know, went astray. Somehow. Sometimes (in the somber opinion of the Newspaper of Record for The United States of America) stuff just happens. Just, y'know, happens.
Stuff.
"Stuff happened"--the new generic two word article in the Times. Saves labor by both editors and journalists. Anyway, whatever this trivial matter was about, if anything, the one thing we know aboout the "investigation"? The one phrase that covers it, pretty much? "Nears end."
Arggh. Oh uck. Oh for godsake. Oh the fucking hell with it. Sigh.
Well, you guys carry on for a while. I'll be back to normal soon, I'm sure. It's just that it's late and I haven't had my insulin and my blood sugar's freaking out. I'm sure it's just a phase. Something.
But
Jesus....
edit: link format
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
