Into the Bray

No I'll stand my ground

Won't be turned around

And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down

Gonna stand my ground

--I Won't Back Down,

Tom Petty

He goes out at night with his big boots on

None of his friends know right from wrong

--Rehumanize Yourself,

The Police

You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain

Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon

--Sugar Mountain,

Neil Young 

_____________________

Subtitle: What We Have Lost.


An unsung casualty of the 2016 election season is humor, that great American salve. R.I.P.

In its place, we have gained a robust factory system of bilge and bile production, delivered by rough performers who dance like marionette puppets to a Democratic laugh track.

When did the take-down of American humor happen? Probably, it was not a discrete event, but a slow and inexorable disappearance. One might look to humorist Jon Stewart, for a start.

In a 2009 Time poll, 44% of Americans said Stewart was their most trusted "newsman". Then Stewart admitted his piker status after his chummy interview and later socializing with Paula Broadwell failed to suggest to him her improper relationship with later disgraced General David Petraeus.

In his blind arrogance, Stewart said of his oversight, "I am the worst journalist in the world." Actually, Mr. Stewart is no journalist at all. At his best, he was amusing, and he left the stage last year before things turned ugly for the fake newsters.

And so we now have entertainers-cum-newsmen like Stephen Colbert getting his props for offering dreck that even a site like "Stormfront" would not proffer. Can you imagine him aiming this grotesque twaddle at President Obama or Mrs. Clinton? (Didn't think so.)

Our airwaves are filled with carnival barkers. Like emcees at a Cafe Risque midnight show, they grow increasingly outrageous in an attempt to keep us awake, tuned in and Twitter-fed.

Humor, satire, civility, and even sanity have left the stage. Many of my associates go snow-blind when they simply hear the name "Trump". Fury, anger, disgust ... I am not sure what overtakes them. The voices rise and, predictably comes the response, "I am so TIRED of hearing about Trump!"

And so they are, for they have been blasted from every one of their media outlets with the unfitness of the man and the supposed unreality and illegality of the election results since last year. At the mention of his name they recoil, for they know the drill -- the inevitable onslaught to follow.

Pain is anticipated, so woe be it to the person who attempts any dialog about the new President outside of a Ft. Bragg bunker playing Lili Marlene, for you are now persona non grata amongst your Democratic fellows. Perhaps they think such a person a troublemaker, callow, or naive?

Ire aimed at this President has become a self-licking ice cream cone.This is operant conditioning, and we have been brainwashed, en masse.

Someone who might buy simplistic slogans like "HOPE" and "CHANGE", or "Make America Great Again?" Pshaw! Perish the thought that anyone could be such a rube, eh? That's the domain of folks like, um, factory workers (do they still exist here?)

Yet the Democrats howl on command as the cant grow ever more tragedic, in the face of little or no facts. Meanwhile, in this fetid environment, the insinuations grow ever larger.

When the pattern of media lies was emerging, Lisa thought to take notes. However, it quickly reached pandemic proportions, and keeping track would have been a fool's errand. Bowing out is the only sane move.

However, before leaving, here are three idiosyncratic examples of why:


1.) When a member of peaceful group of Trump supporters was pepper-sprayed in Huntington Beach (CA) late March, the head was, "Riot Breaks Out at Trump Rally". Now, an ingenue might envision a David Duke sort of fervor, and some gentle liberals -- the sort who used to put daisies in National Guard rifle barrels --being bullied for their non-violent witness.

But it was the other way 'round, and the press identified the attacker of the woman at the peaceful gathering as a "counter-protester". But one must have a "protest" in order to have it's opposite, and the celebrants were NOT protesters.

So the press lied, in order to sow confusion in the reader's mind.

How would the press have covered a pepper spray attack upon a jubilant celebration of President Obama's election? Would the press call them, "racist"? Perhaps, "jack-booted Aryan thugs?" Certainly, they would be "protesters", and not "anti-protesters".

In a final filip, as if to justify their slanted coverage, the article's coda mentions that the protester's numbers are legion nationwide, compared to those who support the President. How is this conjecture relevant to the news piece?


2.) In a recent NYT Magazine piece about Facebook's effect upon the election, even Farhood Manjoo has been forced to sacrifice his reporter's impartiality in service of The Story.

In the piece, Facebook is indicted for the rise of right-wing fanaticism, which is blamed for electing Trump. The election of Trump was the main offense: how Zuck's "news feed" algorithm might have aided conservatives ... that's all.

The story brushed aside the angry democrats who remain so because they are trapped in the bubble of the vanity "news feed".


3.) Michael Moore, erstwhile spokesman for the Little Guy, asks "What Would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Say About Trump?" He posits that he might cry -- which is laughable, were it not so blind. Moore gives us the horsehair shirt his followers want.

But I suggest Rev. King would say, "Let's reach out to our next President. He is our brother."

He would probably form a wonderful relationship with the new President, and appeal to the nation to cease its hatred and riven-ness; to stop the tomfoolery of an "Us vs. Him" mentality. (Mr. Trump has never shown any racial animus.)

He would forefront the plight of the American black which became inadvertently highlighted by violence in President Obama's term. In his own words, he would say let us stop pretending that it was all skittles and beer under Mr. Obama, or that it would have been so under Mrs. Clinton.

She lost the election. Now get on with it. We have work to do.

THAT'S what he'd say.


Democrats --- historical protectors of those who have been trammeled -- have now become the jackals and hyenas doing the trammeling. They are turning us on each other, so we do not ask, "What is really going on here?"

We are allowed neither solidarity nor peace. We have become Sunnis and Shiites (with the occasional Kurd), because that is all the news will allow for us.

Ironically, the Democratic base which has been animated to expulse the daily rot regarding their President is predominately the low- to center middle class, the very people who have been sold down the river by the glutted and disingenuous Democratic Party, a party which has not spoken for them for many years now.

They feel that mutant freaks like Charles Pierce speak for them as they crank up the band of their not very merry pranksters day by day, running their hamster wheel as fast as they can.