I'm rooting for perpetual crisis. I love it when our media and political leaders go ape over some nut burning (or not burning or almost burning) a Quran or some such. I love those militia stories too! Best of all is loony violence from wing nuts in whatever cause. I find the "Tea Party" virtually orgasmic!
So here is a news story that I want to ignore, as will any commentator worth his or her hysteria.
Some of the biggest names in business said Monday that they see a bright future for the economy, with famed investor Warren Buffett declaring the country and world will not fall back into the grips of the recession.
"I am a huge bull on this country. We are not going to have a double-dip recession at all," said Buffett, chairman of Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "I see our businesses coming back across the board."
Horrible! Will someone please shut him up!
See, I'm a writer so I need crisis the way doctors need illness: doctors may want to cure patients, but let's face it, they depend on dire misfortune for their paychecks.
But doctors find it easier to earn a living than writers do. Almost everyone will get cancer eventually, but no one has to buy a book, no matter what their prostate is doing!
The media gatekeepers who give me access to potential readers aren't interested in my books, let alone actual constructive ideas (who reads these days?) but in selling advertising. So in order to let people know about my books I find ways to ride the media's self-serving (ever-briefer) "news" cycles.
In other words, I react to news like playing a video game, which is the way the news outlets react themselves. For instance, a while back I wrote a book about growing up in a bizarre religious household. So whenever I saw a headline about religion-related news Bingo! I'd crash out an op-ed or blog. And then before that I had a bestseller on what it's like to be a Marine's dad in time of war. Hello! War is the one thing we never run out of in America. And our wars never end.
If I'm lucky with the choice of my subjects (call them "Outrages Of The Moment" when I'm on cable news and "Grave Concerns" when I'm on NPR) within a day or so of a blog or op-ed going "viral" I'll be on a cable news shows or self-satisfied radio shows spouting off and the shows' directors will cut to a shot of (or make mention of) my book as if it has something to do with the story at hand.
Of course it mostly doesn't. But they need guests to hype their hype and I need them to sell my books. Exposure: it's the way I get paid for giving my opinion and thus filling a few moments of otherwise dead air for whomever for free.
I pretend that the news show I'm on is more interested in news than in selling advertising and they pretend that I'm an "expert" more interested in their story-of-the-moment than in selling my book. Of course we're fooling no one. But the great thing is that I give good outrage (and/or "concern") and so they get lots of email and my Amazon numbers go up too!
Win/win.
These days panic and hysteria are what sell the "news" that sells the advertising that pays for the media platforms I use to sell my books.
Here's the basic rule of playing the hysteria game: we commentators claim that everything is worse than it is and that if you listen to us we'll help you save our country, economy, religious freedom, children, women's rights -- whatever.
We make a big deal out of nothing much again and again and again by pushing doom at fever pitch packaged as a news, commentary, op-ed or blog. But here's the actual truth we commentators (of the left or right, center or fringe) -- let alone the news business itself -- won't often let slip: America is not in need of saving from anything but hysteria and crisis-driven news!
Nor will we ever say that America is in great shape (compared to just about everywhere else.) And you'll never hear us say these things either, for instance that:
We commentators know that the people we're "informing" by selling "crisis" to also know that we know that they know that what we're actually doing is what they're actually doing: making a living. And that's not too terrible a thing to do, so long as we professional talkers don't take ourselves too seriously, let alone confuse our relentless self-promotion and selling of advertising (mislabeled as "news" and "opinion") with telling the truth.
Come to think of it maybe this Hyping-Of-The-News-Is-A-Crisis crisis can be turned into The Next Crisis to be hyped! It's time to wax historical about being hysterical! I might even write my next sky-is-falling book on that!
Frank Schaeffer is a writer with no new book to sell.... (today).
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
Anis Shivani: The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2011
Of course we might not actually agree on what it is that recovered. While experts such as yourself and Warren Buffet might have picked up on some phantom recovery of the US economy, most of us ain't really seeing it. The recovery I DO see is that American voters have started to recover their SANITY. I'll admit I didn't think we'd see it so soon.
I was troubled by the fact that so many people fell for Obama's sweet talk, and when he took office I was worried that perhaps the socialists had finally found a way to establish themselves for good. I never DREAMED that we all would come to our senses so quickly. Warren Buffet has been right about MANY THINGS in his life, and he was also right this time, sorta. America HAS begun to recover from this nightmare. In November we'll be miles ahead of where we are now.
You seem to simply hurl "socialist" as an epithet at anyone you don't like.
The smart ones will take deceit to an art form, and the dumb ones will just use force.
Can you really say it will all work out just fine?
I mean you can say it, but...
However, clearly there IS a crisis here. You don't currently have a book to sell!
The expansion of media outlets in recent decades has driven the once sedate and generally factual news outlets to resort to shrill, shreiking, crisis-driven headlines in order to compete for attention.
Walter Cronkite only had 2 other networks plus the local paper to compete with. Today there are literally hundreds of 24X7 "news" sources between web and TV. FOX was the first to understand this and came in with their screaming headlines designed to trigger the reptilian brains of their Metamucial slurping viewers. Outrage is extremely profitable so everyone else followed suit.
What I suspect is that even FOX in it's wettest dreams would never have believed how influencial they could be. They wanted to make a buck but now they also get to define the national debate. Sweet sweet power!
The aging racists, sexist, homophobes, xenophobes that were marginalized by the progressive trends of the 60s, 70s and 80s have found aid and comfort in the right-wing media. Now they have full-color, high gloss proof that they and Archie Bunker were right all along. And now we have one of "them" in the White House! OOOOhhh the country is falling! Its the collapse of Rome all over again!
If we get Gingrich/Palin in 2012, they may be right.
About Buffett, nothing wrong with him projecting that our markets will return, since Austan Goolsbee correctly defined our economic condition subject to The Perceptive Economy"- eg. what enough people believe in, WILL occur...
Yup, none of us trusts Washington, and the polls show this. It is all about engaging anti-establishment - against business as usual on the Hill, anything, anyone, but THIS. We all want smaller government,less defense costs, our of foreign wars, less fiscal waste, greater individual production incentives, and YES, we need higher taxes too. Just WHERE these taxes comes from, that IS the Jockeying position right now.
Who are these Bankstas, and how do we rid ourselves of this systemic disease? Removing the croonies, the incumbents and the filibusterers, they are not being PRODUCTIVE legislators. We see this, we act by vote. They are bought-off special interest croonies, and I - for one- ( with all my associates, friends and family ties), will NETWORK to remove them by our unison vote. Nothing about Dems or GOP. Let the Lorelei spin her siren song elsewhere, I'm not listening and as mad as hell....
Oo-rah from a fellow Marine parent
Compromise them all and then negotiate?