The specialty press and the alternative press in general are having a field day over the failure of the Affordable Health Care Acts web design to handle traffic. Forbes is predictably gleeful. Crony capitalism is blamed. Conspiracy theories abound. The mainstream press is more reserved. The demeanor of the stories tells us something about our alarmist, crisis-loving press establishment. Its very like our crisis-loving government, hopping from one war to another, from one manufactured crisis to the next, giving the general population the willies. Why do people attempt to frighten fellow beings? To bully them, to cow them, to get over on them. We need to remember that. In everyones interest that things should work well, so the press pleasure in things not working well is sick. Its one thing to inquire into the nature of trouble, to diagnose, but its another to delight in trouble. And, having said that, we must take careful note of just which troubles the press chooses to delight in: it has not delighted in the utter, bankrupting failure of our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Is the health care act lame? Its certainly lame in its failure to give us decent care, which a single-paper system might have given us. And its certainly crony capitalism in its abundant gifts to the insurance industry, which was the intent of the original Romney project. But when the press today complains of crony capitalism thats not the crony capitalism it means. In other words, where the act really kisses the cronies asses, the press chooses to remain silent. Were a crony capitalist society, and when the press complains of cronyism its merely to distract us from that larger fact.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 19:45:12 +0000
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