So, last night I was watching ol’ Lester rattle on about something on the NBC-Nightly News, and all of a sudden I asked myself, ‘What the fuck is going on with all those miserable sons of bitches who are stuck on the Southern border and can’t get in?’
I thought the mess on the Texas-Mexico border was a rea; humanitarian ‘crisis.’ The media was even showing me videos of little kids who were sleeping in cages because nobody knew where their parents were.
Maybe they all went back to where they came from. Maybe none of the miserable sons of bitches who live in the Southern Hemisphere want to come up here anymore.
Yea, right. I’ll tell you where they are. They’re in the exact, same goddamn place they were three weeks ago. But their presence is no longer news. It’s no longer news because now we are now being treated to a daily media hysteria about the so-called ‘collapse’ of the Biden agenda, as if anyone other than Berne and Joe Manchin give one rat’s damn about the Biden agenda.
The only agenda that I ever thought Joe had during the 2020 run-up to the White House was to get rid of Trump. That’s why I voted for Joe and if you tapped 10 Joe voters on the shoulder and asked them why they voted for Joe last November, all ten would say the exact, same thing.
I’m in the gun business, remember? So, I know lots of guys who voted for Trump. And a few of them were hard-core, true believers who are pissed off because they can’t say the word ‘nig*er’ out loud any more – even their kids get pissed off if they hear that word around the house.
But most of the guys I know who voted for Trump did so in the same way that I voted for Joe – he headed the GOP ticket, and they always vote the red line. And I have always voted the blue line since I first voted in 1968. Like John Nance Garner said when he was asked if he would ever vote for a Republican, “I’d rather vote for a yellow dog.”
Which is where the phrase ‘yellow-dog Democrat comes from; in case you didn’t know.
I get the distinct impression that what we call ‘news’ is really whatever story hits a certain level of clicks or tweets or however the media calculates its viewership, and the moment that the number slips below a certain level, that particular piece of news is good and dead.
Three weeks ago, there was nothing on the nightly news except what was happening in Kabul, particularly when someone blew himself up at the airport and a bunch of our troops were blown to smithereens as well. Meanwhile, all I kept hearing and reading was about this humanitarian ‘crisis’ that was engulfing Afghanistan, but I guess we airlifted enough food into the country in a couple o days to solve that problem, right?
Back in the 1970’s I was teaching criminal justice at a state university, and I decided to offer a course called ‘The History of Crime.’ The class enrolled several hundred students who listened to me shoot my mouth off for three hours every week and then took a mid-term and a final exam, both of which consisted of writing essays to two out of three questions – their choice.
When I corrected the mid-term exams, I noticed that most of them were competent and literate enough to receive a grade of C or B, but a bunch of exams were so illiterate that I couldn’t figure out how to grade them at all.
I wanted to figure out how the University was accepting some students who were so totally unqualified to be in any college course, so I asked all the students to fill out an index card in which they listed their name and their major subject, what we called their ‘concentration.’
Who were the dumbest of the dumb? The kids who said they were in the School of Journalism, that’s who. Now how could kids who were training to get a degree in journalism and go off to work for some newspaper be so illiterate? Shows what I knew.
And when I asked a faculty member from Journalism to explain this problem to me, this is what he said: “Mike, these kids aren’t here to prepared for newspaper careers. They all want to go into TV.”
And this was the mid-1970’s, before cable, before CNN, and of course before the internet and social media which is also video-based. You can do ‘research’ on Facebook without reading a fucking word.
If you seriously believe that the news programs you watch are telling you what’s going on around you to any reality-based degree, think again. It really is fake news.