News
A dumb police officer (I do not defer to the now-standardized thug lingo, “cop”) carelessly uses excessive force to restrain a crime suspect, accidentally killing the man. There is no way to interpret this event as anything other than a run-of-the-mill sad story — a very local, ultimately insignificant story — of your average (or slightly below average) modern police officer, too taken with his sense of authority to calm down and apply common sense in the heat of the moment, and your average petty criminal who unfortunately found himself on the wrong end of a dumb police officer’s moment of fatal carelessness.
Mention, however, that the petty criminal was black, and the dumb police officer white, and the world grinds to a halt for a year, riots ensue, an entire nation is hanging on every moment of the police officer’s trial, and everyone knows perfectly well that if the officer is not found guilty as hell and sentenced to at least twenty years in prison, there will be even greater riots, and dozens of political hacks exploiting this supposedly systemic and world-historical injustice to push forward tyrannical new laws, undermine hundreds of years of civilization, and generally destroy whatever was left of sanity and good faith among ordinary modern humans on the subject of race.
This is what is now called “news” — willingly, mindlessly, cavalierly manufacturing outrage, hatred, revolutionary faction, and opportunities to advance the cause of Marxist totalitarianism in the once-freest country on Earth, along with the cause of increased financial profits for the alleged news media.
I must note, however, for the umpteenth time here in Limbo, that when I say “the alleged news media,” I am not accusing the modern “mainstream” media of being poor at their chosen trade. They are brilliant at what they do. For there is no such thing as an honest news media, a legitimate news media, or a public service-minded news media. One of the great canards and essential stupidities of modern political thought, as a matter of fact — and yes, even the greatest modern minds were subject to blind spots and stupidity in some areas — was the idea that “the press” should, could, and would be a means of holding the powerful accountable. No, it is a means of making money, or a means of propagandizing for one political tribe or another, or (more commonly in the democratic world) both of the above simultaneously. It was never anything else, and it never will be anything else.
The only difference between yesterday’s news media and today’s is that in the past, with the democratic project seeming, in theory, to depend on the concept of a free press that would “speak truth to power,” the profiteers and propagandists that populated that industry sensed that they had to present the public face of quasi-objectivity and pseudo-civility in order to be successful in their endeavors, whereas today, all pretenses of objectivity and civility having been decimated throughout modern society as a whole, our current members of the news media — truly practitioners of “the oldest profession,” if we are to judge them reasonably — no longer feel any of the old moral constraints regarding good optics, or any need to throw a bone to Truth on occasion as they once did.
