It's always interesting to see how the foreign press reports on domestic American issues, like a presidential campaign. This comes via TRex's Tree House to remind us that the whole world is watching. It's from an article on one of the Australian tabloids, Crikey (which requires you to sign up for a "Free Trial" to read the whole article. TRex has dragged it all out here). Here's my favorite part:
“We don’t want our enemies trying to influence the way we vote and I worry about Al-Qaeda making some sort of strike or something before the elections,” says Chris Matthews, one of the half-dozen or so populist blowhards who dominate the airwaves here. People wonder why a third of young Americans say they get most of their information from satirical news sources like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The answer is because it’s the only goddam source that actually tries to synthesise and summarise, rather than sprawling all over the place, like being trapped in a lift with your Uncle Vic, whose prostate is enlarged and is damn angry about the fact that Asian triads are running madrassas in Cabramatta with money supplied by the Australia Council.
Mathews, another bloke named Lou Dobbs, a man named Tucker Carlson who appears to have a well-behaved stoat on his head all work on a virtually identical setting, which is foam-flecked outrage barely kept under control. They all got their start in the Clinton years, and found an audience overwhelmingly composed of angry white people being done over by the collapse of American industry, and looking for anything other than the actual government or economy to blame.
In the past six months they’ve had to modulate their stance somewhat, as it became clear that Bush was so loathed that a large chunk of their audience is switching back to the Democrats. But old habits die hard, and they got a great chance to get back into it when Mitt Romney announced to the annual CPAC - Conservative Public Action Committee — conference that he was suspending his campaign because “to continue would make it more likely that the Democrats would win and surrender in Iraq and I couldn’t help them do that.” In other words, the fight for freedom and pluralism is so important that we have to suspend the actual exercise of it.
If one spectacular attack in seven years puts you on a permanent war footing, always looking over your shoulder, then the enemy has already influenced domestic politics - shaped it pretty much entirely, especially on the Republican side. Which points to the asymmetry of the contest, the Democrats talking about hope, the Republicans about fear. The former are filling a vacuum of despair and disconnection, the GOP (it means among other things Grand Old Party) digging a hole where only a divet is. If there was another attack it would reap dividends, but most Americans have turned inwards, to focus on the sense that something is wrong at the root of the Republic.
Snarky, pithy, right on.
The news has been canceled. We now have nothing but dollar-driven infotainment which, for most of us, has become a daily ritual of self-lobotomization. This hypnotic hold that "the media" has on us seems to have had the effect of transforming the Good 'Ole USA into a culture that is mean, short-sighted and stupid. Or maybe we've always been that way. In any case, it's really embarrassing.
(Originally posted at Amahchewahwah)