Looking for something cheerful? Try last week’s post about the Cubs winning the Series. Got nothing for you this time but anger, frustration, and bitter dismay.
Notice, “shock” and “surprise” aren’t on my list. I’ll leave those to the millions who trusted the nation’s major media outlets to tell them what was up and to the self-deceiving reporters and commentators who believed their own hype.
I’m nearly there, nearly done with the blame game. Nearly done wallowing in the morass of wrong turns and poor choices. Nearly done looking over my shoulder at the high road not taken and looking forward with loathing and dread. Just got one more finger to point, one last question to ask before securing that safety pin to my shirt and re-upping my civil disobedience training. WTF, media? WTF?
Tuesday morning, The New York Times put Hillary’s chances of winning at 85%. As the night wore on and the percentage dwindled, the panels of pundits were stunned. They kept doing the math – like teams at the bottom of the table counting the miracle points that could stave off relegation – unable to credit that the election results were going so far off-script. Finally, humbled by shock and surprise, they threw in the towel. “How could we have been so wrong?” they asked, avoiding the camera or staring into its eye like deer in the headlights.
In typically self-centered fashion, that’s mostly what they’ve been talking about since, as if the inaccuracy of their prediction was the story of the hour.
Throughout this ridiculously, dangerously long and dismal process, I had no proof, no hard evidence to refute the media narrative. While the Despicable D made a bigger and bigger ass of himself, while Hillary “won” all the debates and picked up endorsement after endorsement, all I had was an inner certainty that the NYC/LA based networks, papers, and online mags didn’t have a clue how folks in Kansas City were seeing things. Those who live on our European-influenced eastern shores and our laid-back, Asian-fused Pacific Rim have no concept what the world looks like to those who dwell in the vastness of our nation’s interior. Once again, and this time to the detriment of the entire planet, the predominantly coastal/urban Left blithely underestimated the ignorance of rural/suburban Middle America – an ignorance strategically engineered over the last 4 decades by politicos who believed an uninformed, under-educated, television-addicted populace would best serve their party’s interests and fostered by a religious Right who have been systematically replacing liberal, secular education with fundamentalist dogma.
Want to know what some kids are not allowed to read/have read to them in various parts of these here United States? Check out this link to the “most surprising” banned books of 2013. Some are “duh,” like What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys (’cause bodies are evil) and Harry Potter (’cause magic is evil). Some are “omg,” like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (cross-dressing), Charlotte’s Web (talking animals are an insult to God), and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (sexually-explicit passages and the book is a “downer”). Some compel a face-palm, like Tarzan of the Apes (pre-marital tree-top cavorting), The Dictionary (’cause if you don’t know what it means, the word can’t corrupt you?), and my fave, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (banned because the author has the same name as an obscure Marxist theorist, and the Texas Board of Education didn’t bother to check if they were the same guy).
By eroding our educational standards and forcing crippling debt on our nation’s youth in exchange for the higher education that is pre-requisite to snagging a half-decent job, we’ve turned a lynch-pin of American democracy into another nail in its coffin. In his articulate reflection on how trends of the 70s brought us to Tuesday’s pass, Dave Jimenez cites not only the decline of American educational standards, but also the “slow and soul-numbing assault” of information overload on our consciousness.
“Over the past 40 years,” he writes, “American education has continued to decline, and information overload has increased to the point where people walk around like zombies staring at a tiny screen that constantly updates the ‘status’ of everything they’ve been conditioned to think is important.”
WTF, media. You “misread” the public?
BS. You deliberately gave the public a dog-and-pony-show to get your ratings up. You started this circus more than a year before the election and called it a “race,” because commentating a sporting event generates way more revenue than reporting on pertinent issues. You gave a lecherous, racist demagogue tons of undeserved air time, while ignoring dedicated civil servants who were running policy-focused campaigns. You played up bogus email accusations against Hillary as if they were on a par with Drumpf’s unconscionable threats, invitations to Russia to intervene in the election, and promises to tear down the pillars of our democracy. Despite that his inappropriate comments and inaccurate spiels increased his popularity, you broadcast them night and day. You glossed over his lack of qualifications, his endorsements from xenophobes and racist-terrorist organizations, his 75 pending lawsuits and his appalling tally of 3,500 lawsuits over the span of his unsuccessful career. You treated a vile, cancerous, pus-filled sore on the body politic like a respectable candidate, fer feck’s sake – now you’re shocked and surprised your viewers bought the story you were selling?
The media could have told an honest tale of a worthless failure who bankrupts businesses and won’t pay his bills, then dropped the story and turned to real news. Instead, they kept the spotlight on the bloated blow-hard, deliberately turning him into a political powerhouse, so they could capitalize on his celebrity. By covering a repugnant arsehole’s every word and every move, overlooking his lies and abuses, and tolerating his overt hostility, childishness, vulgarity, and the xenophobic, misogynist tenor and physical violence of his rallies, the media normalized an unqualified, narcissistic gob-shite’s psychotic behavior and the extremism of his supporters. By allowing him to bully his opposition in the primaries, by not deriding him for his fabrications, by not shutting down his man-splaining, for not stopping him from stalking his opponent on national TV, the media tacitly approved every lousy, cheap move he made and incited more of the same from Orange Leader and his followers.
WTF, media? Stop running in circles, backtracking to correct the algorithmic errors of your endless, mind-sucking polls. Stop airing segments on why who voted the way they voted, now that you think you’ve figured it out. Stop analyzing what went wrong, who messed up. You messed up. Big time.
Is féidir leat!
Ah, lost in translation, I fear. As the great Christy Moore would say: “for all of our languages, we can’t communicate..”
‘Ná habair é’ translates loosely as ‘don’t mention it’, so I was really saying ‘you’re welcome’ for the use of the word gobshite; a most apposite choice of words! Far be it from me to try and censure anyone, least of all a published author with a grá for all things Irish.
When all is said and done, and you strip away the rhetoric and the Rust Belt angst, the miles and miles of newsprint comment, and the moral hand-wringing from the middle classes, you are still left with one cold, hard nugget of truth. Trump IS a gobshite.
Ah! I had it “translated” right (don’t mention it). Just didn’t have the intonation — took it as a command, rather than No hay de que or Ça ne fait rien. I’ll re-appropriate ‘gobshite’ when referring to the himbo-elect, then. And, just sayin’, my Irish slang is totally hatchet, yeh?
A Post Script about Pearl Harbor:
We didn’t vote for it but we did vote for those who chose to ignore the warnings. i.e. Charles Lindbergh on return from Germany warned against Hitler and Roosevelt’s warning about Pearl Harbor by Naval Intelligence.
So, in a way we did vote not to stop the attacks before they happened.
d
Good point. But would it be true to say the country was — or at least perceived itself to be — more united then, against a common enemy? And that now we are divided against ourselves?
There is a system I use to maintain sanity (for what ever it is worth)
I get up each morning and make the bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush my teeth and do the dishes.
The next step is to go out on my porch and look around at what I can see.
Then I close my eyes and ask Dios, God, Father Sky, Mother Earth, Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, whomever or whatever: If anything has changed drastically from yesterday please show it to me.
So far everything has been OK.
d
My here-and-now self is right there with you, taking comfort and joy in the super-moon and the lizard warming itself on my front step. My political-social self notes that drastic change is not always obvious. 2016 is officially the warmest year ever on record, with 2015 as a close second. So, keep looking out on the world, m’dear, but when the Secretary of the Interior is venture capitalist Robert Grady (Bush official with ties to NJ Gov. Chris Christie) or Forrest Lucas (co-founder of Lucas Oil) or Sarah Palin (who famously said that if appointed to head the EPA, she’d shut it down), the Gods may well reveal that drastic change that so far eludes our sight.
I can’t help but notice the gobshite word in there in your blog. As a (mostly) Irish person, I say, ‘ná habair é’.
Indeed very sad, but I can’t help wonder if you guys in the states were getting a different message than the rest of the world? Certainly over this side of the pond, it was always quite a close call when you factored in all the polls, and the allowances. The closer the election got, the harder it was to call. I suppose this backs up your post’s main point about the media. WTF. WTF indeed.
In the end, without doubt, the American public had some pretty big questions to ask of its politicians. Alas, Trump is not the answer. I’m willing to bet it won’t be as bad as it could be, partly because there are enough sane people in power to check the tide of craziness (and they like where they are, and playing along with the Tangoed Toad won’t do their careers much good in the long term), and partly because much of what he was saying was playing to the gallery electioneering. But then who knows? I didn’t think he’d get the nod either. Perhaps in the end it comes down to the size of the country; it’s just too damn big to be run by one govt. The federal nature of the place always made me scratch my head, but then I admit that’s easy to say when your own country is only about 4.5 million.
Ireland is about five hours ahead of New York right now. It feels a lot more than that!
Oops, trespassing in international waters with “gobshite,” eh? Tá an-bhrón orm. Guess that was a bit rumbly of me, but otherwise I was flying it with this post, yeah?
“Close call” is a relative term. Hillary’s votes are still being counted, but last I saw, she’s a million ahead in the popular vote. You’re spot-on (sorry), You’ve nailed it with the size factor. Thirteen tiny colonies huddled together in and around New England can operate as one nation. Hard to get a unified-country feel in a sea-to-shining-sea continental behemoth whose outliers play patty-cake with Russia across the Bering Strait and practically mark the Pacific mid-point between the US and Japan.
It’s the electoral college screwed us (as I predicted it would, to my FB friends, at least, way back before the primaries). The electoral college system is particularly painful for Californians these days. Our population is 38,800,000. Wyoming’s is 584,153. California has 55 electoral votes, Wyoming has only 3. More than fair? California: 705,454 votes = 1 electoral vote. Wyoming: 194,717 votes = 1 electoral vote. That means in this last Presidential election, every Wyoming vote was worth 362% more than mine. Resident-Elect Rump is singing the electoral college’s praises these days… no wonder.
Echoing your sentiment, my daughter tells me things rarely turn out as bad as we fear (or as good as we hope). Time will tell. It’s looking pretty bleak to me, and I’m looking at it through posh, socially-mainstream, white-rimmed glasses.
We have overcome events more catastrophic then this. Try Pearl Harbor. Sorry, but anyone who is over 50 and really follows politics should have known better than to expect anything else from the media. How this one was going to end should not have been a surprise. It was easy to see who the real person is. All you had to do was follow his career. We brought this on ourselves by expecting the disenfranchised not to grasp at straws. He just happened to be the wrong straw at the right time.
In 1990 I was in Kenya and found out who Jomo Kenyatta really was. After the media treatment in the 1960s of his forces who were only trying to do the same thing as George Washington did for us against the British I quit reading and watching news in the U.S. Media. Instead I started doing research in other places like Government Archives and University Archives. Starting with Hawaii and ending with the overthrow of the Democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 we have never gotten anything but pap from American news sources. You may call me a kook but I have been preaching to a deaf choir for years. I hear the pain of the reasonable people. It is real but I can’t sympathize. My feelings are numb from being beaten down for so long. I know there were too many good people who were in denial of the Bonus March in 1932 just because of what they didn’t read in the papers. No WTF, Just F the media.
Too true what you say about media pap and propaganda. Too true that expecting accurate, pertinent info from the media is delusional. True enough, research like yours is the only way to know the facts … but un/under-educated people don’t have the skills, time, or access. True enough, the election of a despot ain’t that bad compared to the catastrophe of Pearl Harbor … but we didn’t vote for that catastrophe, we didn’t attack ourselves, and our bombing of Nagasaki, to my mind, was worse. I don’t know how bad the smarmy creep’s presidency will be compared to horrors of the past. We’ll have to see what the Russian puppet and his misogynist Veep do in office, what laws his Congress enact and repeal, what changes his Cabinet — likely to to include a creationist Secretary of Education, a fracking/pipeline-loving Secretary of the Interior, a Secretary of State who wants to reinstate the House of Un-American Activities, a Bridgegate-tainted Attorney General — what changes they inflict on our nation. I hope and trust that whatever disasters ensue, we shall overcome. Sooner or later. And I couldn’t agree more with that last statement you made. F the media.
Well put
Thanks, Roy.
At this point, All you can do is make popcorn
Only if you’re bringing it to share at the rallies and marches ;)
I’ve got to give Dave Jimenez credit where credit is due. The least educated states went red (as in “How stupid is Iowa?”) Must be all those books they DON’T read and all the crap they watch. One of the most painful experiences of election night for me was the commercial-break promotions of the reality TV shows each major network airs. Watching just 10 minutes of one of those is mind-numbing. Who gives a f**k what happens to those people? Better yet, explain to me why anyone should give a f**k. I imagine hardly anyone can tell the difference between “reality” TV shows and anything else they watch on the major networks. DT was apparently just very entrancing entertainment through which Americans lived out their dreams, just as they would projecting onto the characters of reality TV. The network’s approach to DT was certainly the same: massive air time. Shame on them for the bully pulpit they provided him and the sparse coverage they gave Bernie. Shame on them, period.
Thanks for joining me in profanity, Jan. Somehow polite words just don’t convey…
Yeah, well, for me, the turning point was Brexit. When that vote came down and it became clear your average xenophobe in the sticks decided the matter, I had a clear vision of America’s electoral future. Interestingly, the demographic factor that seems to correlate most directly with a person’s Brexit vote is education level. While it’s extrapolation, not statistical verification, the data is still worth a look: Who Voted for the Brexit?