Friday, December 28, 2018

The nub of it

Ann Althouse identifies why it's becoming just about impossible to blog in the age of Bad Orange Man:
I can barely read the news these days (and I absolutely cannot watch it on TV). The negativity toward Trump is so relentless, cluttering up everything. It's crying wolf times a thousand. If anything is worth taking seriously, I'm afraid I won't be able to notice.
That's it. If we're in mortal peril 24/7 and nothing actually happens, why the hell should we take any of the caterwauling seriously? In his always-entertaining year in review opus, Dave Barry notices the same thing:
So when 2018 finally dawned, we were desperately hoping for change. It was a new year, a chance for the nation to break out of the endless, pointless barrage of charges and countercharges, to move past the vicious, hate-filled hyperpartisan spew of name-calling and petty point-scoring, to end the 24/7 cycle of media hysteria, to look forward and begin to tackle the many critical issues facing the nation, the most important of which turned out to be…

…the 2016 election.

Yes. We could not escape it. We were like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except that when our clock-radio went off, instead of Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe,” we awoke to still MORE talk of Russians and emails; MORE childish semiliterate presidential tweets about FAKE NEWS and Crooked Hillary; MORE freakouts by cable-TV panelists predicting that — forget about the previous 300 times they made the same prediction — THIS time impeachment was IMMINENT, PEOPLE. IMMINENT!!

Meet the new year: same as the old year.
I can't take 99% of what I read in the MSM seriously. It means nothing.

5 comments:

Gino said...

Responsible journalism died in 2008. The corpse went into full rot in 2016. What will take it's place?

jerrye92002 said...

Can't take it? Quit reading!

Mr. D said...

Can't take it? Quit reading!

Gotta know what's happening, though.

jerrye92002 said...

Tell you a story. A few months ago I took the grandkids off on a fishing trip, middle of the lake in the far north of MN with no news at all. We were gone a week. When I came back the headlines were exactly the same as when I left. So now I just skim the online headlines, check a few blogs daily and I pretty well keep up. And I rarely need to dig down from the headlines, since much of it is "Trump bad" or "Climate Change Horror" sorts of fearmongering yellow journalism. And that's the nicest we can say about it. Doing that is great for lowering the blood pressure.

3john2 said...

I subscribe to Rattle in order to receive a poem a day, now that MPR has gas-piped The Writer's Almanac. I'm always interested in reading something that edifies or resonates in some way. Sad to say, almost everything I've received from Rattle is self-absorbed mewling about temporary, not eternal, truths. Once just came up the other day, though, I deemed worthy to add to my collection. I offer it, and the author's commentary, below.

“Your Fear” by Leatha Kendrick
Posted: 23 Dec 2018 12:00 AM PST

Now ask yourself—who might it serve that you
would grow downhearted? What do you choose
to see? What will your seeing make? The “news”
selected and relayed, mirrored and soon
a billion times its weight, weighs on the mind
that seeks it out. What is the new? The breath
just drawn, the thought not yet enfleshed, the kind
word being said, the stars that press unseen
overhead. “It is the unforeseen
upon which,” Poe said, “we must calculate
most largely.” Impossible to separate
misery and joy—the living edge of mystery.
Time’s unfolding, dauntless, holds you dear.
The universe has no need of your fear.
—from Poets Respond
December 23, 2018
__________
Leatha Kendrick: “Like many others, I have distanced myself from the 24-hour news cycle. Last week here in Lexington, Kentucky, reader and writers celebrated Thomas Merton’s life with a reading from his works. Merton, who died in 1968, lived in Kentucky at the Abbey of Gesthemani and had many friends among Kentucky writers including Wendell Berry (one of my teachers and mentors). As I listened to again Merton’s clarity about what divides us, I realized he could have been writing about today. As the Vietnam War intensified, Merton saw the opportunities for distortion and manipulation inherent in television reporting. He claimed to have only watched television twice in his life.

His words made me ask myself again, ‘What do we gain from the 24-hour news cycle? What is it selling, if not fear? And for who’s benefit?’”