(After months of non-functioning hands because of hand surgery and events leading up to it, I can now keyboard with digits 3,4, & 5 of each hand. You can expect some vitriol on our health care system in coming months as a result of a medical episode that began in an emergency room in Colorado and will, hopefully, come to positive issue in the physical therapy facility at the new Aberdeen regional YMCA.)
Anyone who does not see the trappings of racism and sexism and other forms of mental degradation as major issues in the presidential primaries has their brain pan firmly implanted in their lower colon. The media, particularly blogs, are in a state of titillation at exchanging euphemisms for issues of sex, race, and other preferred bigotries,
Lou Dobbs of CNN visibly struggles to choke back the N-word when he rants against Obama. The regressive blogs, some with tendentious fatuity that professors try to pass off as “reasoned discourse,” others with the weird bigotries that make no pretense to reason, have taken up the issues of Hillary’s personality and Obama’s racial identity with a cacophony but very discernible sexism and racism not well disguised by the contrivances they muster to avoid the overt use of “bitch’ and “n-word.”
For three months I have been electronically silenced by hands that could barely click a mouse. Occasionally, I have found blog entries that aspire to discourse and somewhat thoughtful and apt expression of ideas, But most blog posts are devoted to crude self-adulation or an ad hominem tirade against someone of a differing political stance. I have become convinced that those who espouse negative derogation as the most effective form of campaigning are right. It is what a large portion of the populous lives for. If blogging is the journalism of the people, we have a surplus of nasty-assed people out there,
Matthew Arnold said literature is the best that humans think and write. Blogs are at the bottom of the scale of human expression. They tend to be dementedly mean, crudely written, and reveal little egos living out lives of desperation. Our education system seems to have elevated the sounds of primal frustration to the ultimate measure of self-expression.
The outright examples of verbal dishonesty I have noted in the press and on the blogs in the past months are enough to fill volumes. A few blogs, which I will reference in weeks to come, have acted to set the record straight.
Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has been represented by blatant misquotation and racist finagling. He has corrected the dishonesty. But the press and its parasitic bloggers would rather let the n-word resonate.
Hillary has a forced laugh and can get shrill and unlikable. It is more important to let the b-word resonate than to hear her ideas.
If this is what our democracy has come to, what’s the point? But there is huge population who neither writes nor reads blogs and pays little attention to cable news.
May they prevail.
