I was running some errands to our local grocer yesterday after having gone for a sustained walk on a warm and muggy morning, so I was wearing my wick free (? witless more likely) shirt and gym shorts with itty-bitty pockets so I had to leave my cell phone at home.
I mention that because you'll have to take my word for this part because right here, ______, that's where the picture would go, except I don't have one.
Coming out of the market I passed a Jeep Patriot with a bumper sticker on the vehicle's upper left back window, reading: "Save the Constitution. Read www.infowars.com."
If you wonder what happened to a link to the whackjob's actual website, keep wondering because you won't find it here. The site in my opinion (and I am far from alone) makes Fox News look like MSNBC (come to think of it, O'Reilly and Maddow could almost be twins, right?) and the Jeep driver sees it as a mutant New York Times of some kind?
My absolutely oldest friend in this life, Nat Clymer (who may deny our association now and who could blame him?), is a gifted photographer (as you can see for yourself at that link) once observed, 'many people own pianos but don't call themselves pianists, but everyone with a camera calls themselves a photographer." The same is true for other professions.
At one time, newspaper, magazine, radio, and television news reporting was an honorable and honored profession with years of training and an intricate near-apprenticeship arrangement as your craft unfolded and deepened but the convergence of technologies and proliferation of ideologies has allowed anyone, to include yours truly, with a keyboard and an internet connection to call him/herself a "journalist."
We can shop on-line for our truths and news the way we shop for a car or a can of corn. And have a worldview spoon-fed to us that we think we're choosing for ourselves when nothing is farther from the truth. Variety is more than the spice of life, it's the lifeblood of our own intelligence. As this election cycle will make terribly clear long before we get to November, we need to continue to think for ourselves while it is still legal.
-bill kenny
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