OCTOBER 6, 2020 – Yesterday the media fell for yet another publicity stunt by the fake president. I’m convinced they’re in cahoots—real media and a pretend mogul. If Trump hadn’t been allowed to trumpet—starting with “birtherism”—we’d have avoided the runaway bus.
According to a CNN poll, 63% of Americans think Trump was irresponsible in handling the risk of spreading Covid among the people around him. Four percent have no opinion—and apparently didn’t hear the question. The remaining 33% think Trump handled the risk responsibly. The 63% should worry Trump’s supporters. The 33% should worry the rest of us.
As I watched the theatrics unfold commencing precisely with the network broadcasts of the evening news, I imagined the head of CBS News calling her counterparts at ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC and saying, “I’m pulling the plug on coverage. What do you say?”
Sadly, I also imagined their one-word rejection: “Ratings.”
And then there’s FoxNews—same motivation, different market segment and . . . absolutely no shame.
Rupert Murdoch has done more harm to democracy than Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini’s best efforts by bombs and bullets in WW II. But we’re a free country where everyone is allowed to make a buck and some people, particularly someone who isn’t even an American, is allowed to make really big bucks. And if you’re Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or Laura Ingraham, you can turn facts and reasoning into a pretzel factory and peddle its product to an insatiable market of 33% of the country.
Only in America.
My mother, who was no Marxist, was fond of citing Karl Marx’s belief that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction; except she didn’t mean it in the way the German philosopher, historian, economist, sociologist, political theorist meant it. He thought that since bourgeoise wealth depended on the sweat of the proletariat, the latter would eventually revolt against the system. My mother believed that ignorance, lack of religious faith, and other attributes of modern liberalism would lead to our downfall.
As events have played out, however close Marx and Mom were to the bull’s eye in their common conclusion, their opposing analyses were both wide of the target.
The proletariat of the world haven’t united in the fashion Marx predicted. (For the most part, the Bolshevik Revolution was led by a relatively tight circle of intellectuals, later high-jacked by a former bandit with a dark personality make-up of paranoia and masochism. Ditto “communism” in China, Cuba, and elsewhere.) And the “liberals” that my mother warned against couldn’t hold a candle to the combined power of the religious right, the “patriotic” consumers of Kool-Aid, and the people who, upon gathering immense wealth, develop an insatiable thirst for yet more of it.
It’s this last feature that is on the vanguard of our undoing. Our free market culture rushes to whatever sells best, and what sells best is what’s worst for our body politic—bright, shiny, ephemeral objects composed of pyrite.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
