COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRISTOPHER HEBERT IN THE
GUARDIAN
“My year of living
ignorantly: I entered a news blackout the day Trump was elected
Being a news junkie
left me well-informed but simmering with rage. Unplugging from the media made
me feel better, but is it a cop-out?”
God, this kind of stuff is tiresome.
Yes, Trump is a pretty nasty American, but as someone who
was born and grew up there, and as someone who also takes an interest in news
and affairs, a critical interest, I can tell you with confidence that there are
a lot of nasty Americans.
And a lot of very angry Americans. A lot of truly ignorant
Americans. A lot of deeply prejudiced Americans. And just a lot of very
unthinking Americans.
Anyone who suddenly wakes up in the America I know so well
and thinks, as this writer does, has simply not been listening to the news he
claims to love.
The very news sources cited here have been guilty of
countless shadings and dishonesty over my lifetime. Fake news is an invented
phrase, a creation of the last couple of years, but the ugly reality of fake news
– what we used to call anything from yellow journalism to propaganda - has
existed my entire adult life.
All that press beating the drums for Vietnam? Beating the
drums for Iraq? Beating the drums for Libya? Beating the drums for Syria?
Beating the drums for the Cold War? Beating the drums for
the mindless War on Terror? Beating the drums now for second Cold War against
Russia? Never once investigating and questioning decades of aggressive imperial
wars or the countless injustices America promotes and protects in this world?
Eight years of Obama bombing people?
Coming after eight years of Bush bombing people?
Constant violence in the streets of America? Violent young
criminals? Violent police? As many guns in private hands as there are people?
Whole cities that look like something after WWII and no one
in government has done anything to remedy the situation?
A new level of pervasive surveillance on Americans,
surveillance which makes the old East German Stasi look amateur, surveillance
brought in by that charming smiler, Obama?
An America which now regularly makes people disappear in
many parts of the world? Thousands of them executed with no trial or rights in
a fashion indistinguishable from some military junta?
And someone is in a crisis just because of Trump and his
loud mouth?
This would be laughable were it not that this represents a
good portion of public opinion in America.
Take away that ugly man, and everything will be just fine
again in America. The blood dripping from the hands of Bush, from Cheney, from
Hillary Clinton, from Obama, an entire federal government which does nothing
for its own people, a bloated murderous Pentagon and CIA, a corrupt FBI – all
this is just fine, though. I can go back to CBS.
