You don't have to watch a lot of news, on whatever platform you choose, to assume, as I have, that America's #1 blood sport is Stomp the Leaders. I'm not sure when the game started, but I don't remember it being as vicious when I first came back to the USA in 1991 but then again I wasn't as callous myself as I am now.
I confess to not paying much attention as the tone heated up through the years-especially when so many public figures, whom it was fashionable to mock, proved to be so filled with frailties and foibles. Maybe it was just coincidence that the Good Ship Lollipop started taking on water and the dominoes started toppling. Maybe.
When the dust had momentarily cleared, we had a black person as the President and a lot of (other) angry middle-aged white guys unelected to anything other than the big chair in a TV studio. Just me, but we went downhill right after that and still haven't yet reached the bottom.
Not really surprising that the news cycles all head in the same direction as water down the plynth, especially as the countdown to this year's mid-term elections draws closer. It's physics, really: for there to be an inside there has to be an outside, and if there isn’t, we make one up.
We no longer have to make any effort to avoid being partisan. As a matter of fact, our corporate media insists and assumes we be even more so. I think I once was the most cynical man on earth. I've since gotten schooled so often by the real wizards I should be buying lunches for the pompous stuffed shirts on the Big Screen.
There’s safety in numbers when we learn to divide—we are, as a nation, very uncomfortable in our skins these days and we should be. Many of us weren’t getting an especially heaping helping of the Promised Land when times were good-but all of us got something. When the bottom dropped out, and the well-to-do chose to help themselves rather than anyone else, those already at the bottom discovered, gravity be damned, there is farther to fall.
We naturally assume someone has to be to blame for what happened to our country in these last three or so decades. When what really happened was we traded the red, the white, and the blue for green, a little bit at a time every day-not even consciously or deliberately all the time it just worked out that way.
We’re sure as hell not gonna ever cowboy up and admit that we did this to ourselves and to one another.
-bill kenny
-bill kenny
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