Sitting here at my desk on the morning after a non-disaster that was tropical storm Henri, there are many things to be concerned and upset about. I could wring my hands and contemplate the horror unfolding in Afghanistan, or shake my head in stunned silence at the abject nuttiness of setting our military to fighting phantoms like “white supremacy” and “systematic sexism” while ignoring (or worse, enabling) actual systemic sexual slavery, torture, rape and murder. I could. But to get there I’d have to listen to the little people talking in the magical box attached to the wall, and I tend to ignore them.
If I just sit here I can hear the kittens playing a room away and a chainsaw in the distance. I can see all of the pears on the lawn that were shaken out of the tree and I know that if they are not raked up and dumped into the compost pile, they will rot where they fell and in three days I’ll have a yard full of yellow jackets. These are things that actually effect me. The yellow jackets won’t mind if the pears aren’t directly beneath the tree and the skunks and squirrels are accustomed to investigating the compost pile anyway. They won’t go hungry.
What of those talking heads in the magic box, though? “Watching the media” has taken on a new meaning for me, and I do not think that I am alone in this regard. Once upon a time I consumed media for information. I listened to NPR and read The Boston Globe and turned my attention to the things the media claimed attention worthy. Now I watch the media more to see what they refuse to cover (Hunter Biden, the disaster on the southern border, Ilhan Omar marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud and the FBI’s disinterest, and, of course, Joe Biden’s ever increasing feebleness). As purveyors of information, which is ostensibly their product, their stock in trade, the media has failed on a massive scale. Social media is following quickly. Playing catch-up ball on the road to irrelevance.
When I went on the trail in March I stopped using FaceBook, but didn’t delete my account because messenger remains the best way to contact many people from my past, and two days ago I clicked through to FB to see what a feed looks like today. Hoo boy.
The first “story” on my feed looked for all the world like it came from FOX News. There was a photograph of Juan Williams and the headline, “Soon you won’t be hearing from him any longer”. Clicking through brought me to a page that looked like a FOX story linked by a poster, but as I read the story it became increasingly bizarre. The Five, a popular FOX show, is being canceled (the story claimed) because Greg Gutfeld (who’s show just beat out Steven Colbert for most popular late night show) keeps shilling for a CBD gummy he sells out of his home. Gutfeld, the story claimed, refused to stop touting his gummy business because the stuff is just too miraculous to deny, and the public needs to know about the miracle cure. It was chaos, the story said, with Jesse Watters siding with Juan and demanding FOX fire Gutfeld and sue for breach of contract.
And it was a complete fabrication. An ad for a particular brand of CBD oil, disguised as pressing news. “What disingenuous Bozos,” I thought. Soon, they’ll be selling brine shrimp as Amazing Sea Monkeys. I logged out.
There is no percentage in going toe to toe and screaming with people who are deluded and lost. Many seem to have lost their way so thoroughly they still believe the Russian collusion hoax, the smears against Brett Kavanaugh, that Trump is a racist who hates gay people and that Adam Schiff still has “proof positive” in his underwear drawer. Reality is all around them, like the air they breathe, yet they still insist the fantasy that was created is real. Me, shouting “No it is not!” is not going to change any minds. Far better for me (and them) that I quietly chuckle and allow reality to bite them on the ass.
I read an editorial out of the UK this morning: “Does hate crime no longer matter?”
The writer, Brendan O’Neill makes an interesting observation, true here as well as there. “News”, what is covered and what is not, is now simply a tool used to control the narrative. It is an editorial worth reading.
“When you judge people as racial blocs, and even afford or deny empathy to them on the basis of where their racial bloc appears in your oppression list, then there will naturally be limits to your anger about extremist or hateful violence. And that’s shocking. If your concern about racism and other forms of ideological hatred is determined by the question of whether the perpetrator comes from a ‘bad’ identity or a ‘good’ identity, then your concern isn’t with racism and hatred at all; it’s with maintaining the new racialised hierarchies of identity politics and your own privileged place in enforcing and policing them.”
I’ve come to believe that idiocy is nothing new and can not last. It never has. Even massive and horrific idiocy==The Inquisition, Nazism, famine used as a weapon—came, did incredible damage, and (like an actual hurricane) petered out. Woke identity politics is, in comparison, just a stupid and temporary fad, more like the craze in the 80s and 90s for show trials based upon recovered memories. Lives were certainly upended and ruined, but in the grand scheme is is hard to compare the ridiculous and unjust trial of The Amiraults to, say, the 3.9 million Ukrainians killed by Stalin during Holodomor. Stupidity rankles, and it is hard watching people succeed telling toxic lies, even in the short term, but my suspicion is that it has always been this way.
Leave it to the delusional woke to don their cardboard armor and joust with windmills. The job of the sane is, as it has always been, to simply hunker down, refuse to concede that the naked emperor is finely dressed, and wait for the wave of crazy to pass. Certainly do nothing to feed the fever. It will pass and one day, when children are asking what we did when the Woke Craziness was sweeping the western world, we can proudly say, “Me? I did nothing. I pointed and laughed and lived my life.”