Ignore Congress and the Supremos

I am a reasonably retired mid-level journalist of no import but much experience, interested in international affairs, law, society, education, and political trends. Yet, God’s truth, I do not know who Boehner and Pelosi are, or were, and now somebody or something called Ryan. Yes, I know that they are in Congress, or were, but I do not know what posts they hold, or held, or in which party they are, or were, or in which house. I really do not.

How can this be? How can someone who has spent a lifetime in the fetid bubblings of the news racket, including many years in DC, be so profoundly ignorant of the most elementary of political facts? Isn’t that like a neurosurgeon who can’t find the brain?

No.

Along with Congress and the Supreme Dead and other such abandoned houses, I put Big Journalism. Encapsulated in a curious bubble of isolation, it serves chiefly to to produce a narcotic droning. The first rule of BJ—that’s “Big Journalism”—is to choose a point on the Left-Right continuum (it doesn’t matter what point) and never, ever deviate from it. This rule, rigidly followed, makes unnecessary the reading of their output. They could be done in software. Name a subject and you know without further investigation the views of any given talking head. Why listen to them?

If anyone comes along who doesn’t fit, either news weasel or pol, they want to disappear him.Thus we see the Republicans, desperate to find a candidate that Hillary can beat, chattering at each other, “Is Trump Really a Conservative?” Not “Does what he says make sense?” The underlying question of course is “How can we get rid of this guy that the constituency wants but who isn’t a member of the tree house?”

They all seem to spend their time talking to each other about each other. They remind me of ingrown toe-nails. I think of this as the National Review Two-Step, though it is industry-wide.  (Journalism is an industry: Ay, there’s the rub.) Thus the endless stories, “Leibniz on Atkins,” “Tugwurtle’s Response to Michael Moore on Coulter.”

When I go to political sites like, say, Breitbart.com, I find dozens of talking herds, almost none of who have I heard of. They seem fascinated with each other. None ever says anything that provokes thought. They are like birds perched on their chosen points on the political x-axis, singing the song appropriate to that point. (Maybe you didn’t know that birds could perch on  axes. Well, they can.)  I suspect that they all live in a sealed cage in New York, connected to each other by wires. I am sick of their chirping.

If they have any notion of what is going on in the US, they conceal it well.

And my God, the narcissism. Any more self-esteem among the talking heads and they would need toe shoes. Reporters used to be honest drunks, ashen-souled, chain-smoking, profane, ugly, their cynicism a conclusion, not a pose, more concerned with getting the news than being the news. Ernie Pyle, Don Marquis, Mencken, Seymour Hersh.  Today “journalism” looks to be a branch of central casting in Hollywood. We have Michael Moore, who in his working-stiff costume seems to be trying out for a bit part in Rumble on the Docks, and Megyn Kelly, a babble-blonde BJ bimbo hoping for a gig with Victoria’s Secret.

Mencken

‘Nuff said.

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