When you switch on the news, it is nothing but politics. This did not used to be the case. Politics is actually rarely newsworthy. In fact politics isn't what is happening in the world, it is meant to be what goes on in certain buildings in response to what is going on in the world. And it is only one area of that response. But what has happened is that people are not learning about those world events, and world conditions, that the politicians are supposedly responding to. Hence the reactions to the political news is emotional and meaningless.
In a civil state what people would want to know is that is going on around the world, not simply what is going on in a few highlighted contests in a few offices of government in their own country. The US has 50 state governments, and these have city governments. Hence the Washington politics is really only a portion of one subject of one country.
People are thus learning nothing about the world actually. This is becoming very surreal. People have reactions to what looks like reactions to world events by politicians, yet have no solid understanding of those world events -- and yet have an excited opinion about those reactions. People are reacting to reactions, with no real knowledge of what all the reacting is to.
Then the people's reaction (to what they don't know) becomes itself often the news. And then people react to that! And it goes round and round like that.
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| This is not news |
If the news every night dwelled night after night about the happenings in a whore house in Bangladesh, each night covering who did what to whom, who is upset at what, whose in, whose out, people would rush home to catch the latest updates. That's how stupid people are.
I want to be sure I've made the point clear. The world is a very big place. Things happen. As they say, 'stuff happens.' Individual people and groups do things all around the world. Often history is needed to see those actions in their full context. There are also events such as weather events, accidents, that are beyond human control but affect our lives. These too often require context, to see how an event in one part of the world effects others. This requires global understanding.
Now turn on the television shows that call themselves "news." A pundit is reacting to the reaction of a politician to a group of protestors reacting to a statement by another politician about some reaction to something by a group of people. None of these people discuss the actual global and full historical context of anything actually occurring of genuine significance. This is colossally primitive.
Now as I said, things happen, often of great import. Politicians are NOT the only people that react to these things. Religious groups react, artists, citizens. But the focus is on the politicians, as if their highly uninformed reactions are the only ones worth noticing, or that have import. People listen to what some politician says about a nation, and decide which politician has the right reaction to what they themselves (and the politician) know very little about. For instance people are for or against going to war with nations they can't find on a map. And they protest the politician's reaction. Does anyone see a problem in all this? The big news that people then rush home to watch is the reactions of reactions to the reactions. No one takes the time to study the full scope of the issue. And few stop to wonder if that is really important in the larger scheme of things.
Finally the news becomes the news. Commentators comment on the comments of other commentators. And the people march over that, and then that becomes the news. Reaction is the story.
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