It makes me titter like a drunken Camp-Fire girl watching a Justin Bieber video when I see pundits and journalists, heavily credentialed and grave, speaking on the issues of the day as if in possession of universal truths universally shared and universally respected.
For, as intractable and divisive as the rightwing is in their sociopolitical agenda which, if anything, resembles a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon, the prevailing punditry (comprised of nincompoops from both Right and Left ideological persuasions) are as hopelessly circuitous when it comes to addressing the actual thing that ails.
And the thing that ails most, is most apparent and distressing to anyone with a pair of evolved eyeballs, is The War At Home. And anything else that is being discussed, whether it is the debt ceiling, health care, the economy, or any "hot button" items on the check-list of social behaviors are all raging and topical and seemingly unsolvable only because The War At Home is utterly ignored.
Watching the elephant in the room (and we all know what elephant that is) wage its war on America in a way that renders the war itself virtually invisible to the victims being ravaged is a study in psychological manipulation which would have made history's most devious propagandists' jaws go slack with admiration. The sheer genius of wresting reality from the nation's senses is, if nothing else, an indication that the once boasted-about American spirit of innovation and enterprise is at least alive, if not the slightest bit well. Imagine how fast our crumbling infrastructure could be repaired if that same dedication were applied to that apparently insignificant area!
The News Corp scandal will be interesting to watch as it unfolds, to see if the machine which epitomized the very crime for which it is being (so far) held accountable will fall to the roused temper and awakened senses of an outraged British public. Perhaps then, the same outrage will awaken the American public to the hijacking of its own awareness by the swaggering über-weasels who have turned our media into a similarly garish side-show; the big-pharma, big-military shills who masquerade as public servants and steer our policies back into the dark places from whence they were bred into being; the win-at-any-and-at -all-costers who have turned governance into a dispensary for unregulated corporate profiteering. But will there be anyone to report it?
The scandal and its developing repercussions presuppose that Britain still has an innate sense of right and wrong somewhere within its own corporate-saturated justice system; that the hacking of one innocent dead teen's phone was simply too much for the public to bear. Could, one wonders, the same be said for this country and its confounding submission to the forces who would daily deny people their right to affordable health care, their right to a good public education, their right to choose, their right to fair and factual news and information, and all the while opining about Islamo-Facism, birth certificates and the war on Christmas?
Or, as it appears, are the bought-and-sold experts just talking crap, either purposely or obliviously distracting from the coup d'état that gains ground with every belching bromide and sneering dis? Because until people's outrage is expressed (and not the contrived "outrage" of an astro-turf political populist puppet party) then the nonsensical discussions and endlessly inane arguments played out in what passes for news will continue to hold the audience's attention and enable the invisible prosecution of The War At Home.