Last Issue:Whose Dominion Is It Anyhow?

I love this country.  Madly, deeply love it.  For rock and roll.  For movies.  For comic books, truck stops, and Stephen King.  We have thirty-seven brands of wet wipes.  24-hour money machines and drive-through wedding chapels.  We’re the most generous nation on the planet – look it up, if you don’t believe me – and we’ve got the best sense of humor (just check out our chief executive).

All that said, however, we’ve got some major issues.  We think we’re the Top Dog globally but we’re not even close.  In categories such as freedom of the press, infant mortality, and public school scores…we’re wearing the planetary dunce hat.  As a nation we’re like a big, spoiled, pubescent teenager -- all we do is stare at screens, eat junk food, and sleep.  And when the time comes to clean our rooms?  Do the yard work?  We pull a Huck Finn and pay illegals peanuts to do our dirty work. 

But it’s worse than laziness.  It’s arrogant, self-destructive stupidity.

Practically every other industrialized nation on earth has figured out a way to provide medical care for all, and we can’t even make safe cat food.  Our atmosphere has dry rot and most of us middle-class Americans are still cruising around in giant mini-buses with home entertainment centers and gas mileage of about two feet per gallon.  Our government is killing foreigners in the middle east and most of us would need a little extra time just locating Iraq on a map.  We don’t know Sunis from Sony’s. 

We’re all just fiddling while Rome burns.

And TV is feeding the flames.

With apologies to Springsteen, TV nowadays is a million channels with nothing on.  Just as the Roman Circuses foretold the fall of the Empire, TV today is our canary in the coal mine…and the bird ain’t feeling too chipper.  With all the specialized channels magnifying our culture’s ennui and intellectual banality, we’ve become mesmerized by the tinsel of shopping shows, food porn, fake reality, and off-key renditions of pop dreck sung by poor rubes who are meant to make us all feel superior.

But the worst offender is the news -- the sleaze merchants behind the anchor desk and the blow-hard pundits blabbing opposite sides of so-called hot topics.  Every complex issue is reduced to a cute comeback or clever riposte.  The big lie is that everything is black or white, right or left.

I’m here to tell you, nothing is black or white.  Black and white are abstractions.  Black and white represent the absence of color...the absence of thought.  And black and white, in some mysterious way, might very well lead to perhaps the most deplorable human trait: hypocrisy.

Let me close with an example of extreme hypocrisy on the tube. 

Not too many weeks back, as many of you undoubtedly remember, a very disturbed college kid went on a rampage at Virginia Tech.  In the throes of his murder spree, this kid actually paused to run a macabre errand: he went to the post office.  With his delusional grandeur bubbling at high boil, he sent a virtual press kit filled with self-produced home videos and photographs.  Shots of him looking all bad and cool.

The press kit was sent to NBC.

Now...I’m not naive enough to believe a network is going to act all moral and altruistic, and perhaps withhold these images from the air.   Never mind that withholding these images would have been the right thing to do.  Never mind the fact that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of aberrant psychology knows that these images will only do two things: titillate the public and egg on copy cats.   NBC is in business to make money.  Period.  All other agendas get pushed into the pro bono circular file. 

I’m not complaining about all that.

What I have a beef with is the shameless, pathetic rationalization that Brian Williams and the NBC brass gave us for showing the images.  According to them, it was all in the public interest.  It was all done tastefully and discreetly, and it was for our own good.  We should thank NBC for their sensitivity.  Their wisdom.

Yeah...and I have an amazing little time share just outside of Baghdad that I’ll sell you for a song.

The truth is, none of these images were news.  The only news was that this kid sent the package to NBC.  That’s where the news ended.  The creepy pictures inside the package were just sensationalist, violent, narcissistic masturbation.  Shock porn.  The stuff of WEEKLY WORLD NEWS…

…and NBC.

Hypocrisy.