One of the reasons Im glad I no longer have a television is because I am not tempted to fill my head with all the fearmongering and sensationalism and partisanship that passes for news on the television screen these days. The news I get is gleaned from the digital editions of newspapers. Thats it. No talking-head programs. No stories jumped on and jiggered-up to, in turn, jigger up ratings. Etc. Etc. Andrew Sullivan writes about it all after having watched some Fox News on in his hotel room television. Ive so broken the cable news habit myself when I find myself in a hotel room it never even dawns on me to turn on the television. It just doesnt interest me anymore. It was the main reason I threw out my television - this freeing myself from the incessant noise of cable news - since I havent gone cold turkey from TV programming itself because I watch Hulu and Netflix and find my shows a day or so later on there. Andrew writes: America, my adopted home, is a place of wonder, of energy, of enterprise, of compassion, of risk and diversity. But it is now and always has been a place where deep-seated fear and paranoia have always simmered below the surface – where McCarthyism once stalked the land, where recent hysteria justified the American president authorizing appalling torture of hundreds of people (with complete impunity), where civil liberties were shredded in a period when more people were killed by lightning than by terrorism, where refugee children as young as eight or nine are treated as terrible dangers to the republic, where undocumented immigrants are left in permanent limbo and where legal immigrants are treated as threats first and assets second, and where our leaders, whom one might expect to calm the public, instead fan the flames of panic for short-term political gain. The great achievement of those maniacs in Iraq and Syria is to have ignited this strain in American life, exploited the PTSD of 9/11, and brilliantly baited this country into another unwinnable, bankrupting war which will only deepen the polarization that leads to more terror – a war in which what’s left of democratic accountability and constitutional norms are once again under threat. I see no one in our elites, including the president, doing anything to calm this down. And I see a Republican landslide coming in the Congress this fall, with all the consequences of more war and more hysteria ahead. Welcome to America, no longer the land of the free or the brave, but the land of the paranoid and terrified. I haven’t felt this glum since the Bush-Cheney years. Because, it appears, they never really ended.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 20:20:08 +0000
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