The Sad Professor

Submitted for your approval, a professor who was in agony...because of his own narcissism.

The future belongs to her

A little meditation on a extremely annoying theorist I once met in passing...who was very sure that the future belonged to her.

Note To The 1%: The Alternative

Note to the rich and powerful, here are your options...

Choose carefully.

On The Morning Of The Coronation

I woke up this morning to find that Hillary Clinton had won not only the primary in California but also in several other states, including the one in which I live, New Mexico. As a good Bernie supporter, this disappointed me. But I can live with it, so long as there is not a Trump presidency in November.

What does disappoint me, however, and genuinely concerns me, is the media coverage so far. I don’t just mean the failure of the major news networks to notice the Sanders campaign for, like, ever. We’ve known all along that was happening—the vast crowds at Bernie rallies that somehow didn’t get televised, the primary victories that somehow were reported as defeats, and on and on and on.

What I do mean is that reading and watching the news this morning I was struck by the extraordinary uniformity of tone in the reportage. Commentator after commentator, news outlet after outlet, proclaimed that Clinton’s victory was total, and more, and that we should all be terribly proud of her, for it was “historic”—the first time a female candidate had gotten this close to the White House.

And if there was any notice at all paid to the Sanders campaign, it was to chide the man himself, and his supporters, for not doing the graceful thing and bowing out now. In fact, in several pieces I saw on the web, Sanders was portrayed as a rather mean old man, too stubborn to know that it was all over. And his followers? Infantile, entitled, and maybe even potentially violent. Oh, and via the marvelously effective but vaguely defined term, “Bernie Bros,” doubtlessly sexist as well.

Now, I’m going to skip over the issue of whether or not these interpretations of events are correct. I think they’re not. I think, in fact, that they’re so wrong as to be laughable. I want to focus instead on the reporting itself. It is stunning, genuinely stunning, to note just how universal these attitudes are in the media. Except on the odd fringe outlet, like the marvelous “Young Turks” Web-news service, you simply don’t see an alternative to this particular narrative.

It is so consistent, indeed, that it seems…let’s be blunt… a bit scripted.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not saying that everyone in the national media is in on a secret plot to throttle the Sanders campaign and install Hillary in the White House. But, still this whole thing just feels creepy. There is something odd about so many people in positions of authority being on the same page at the same time, and reading in exactly the same tone of voice.

At the very least you have to suspect there is some groupthink going on here—that the pundits are talking way too much to one another, and not nearly enough to us unwashed masses outside the Beltway, Manhattan, and L.A.

And at the very most…well, there are only six major communications corporations in the country right now. Time Warner, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Viacom, and General Electric (NBC) own pretty much everything. I believe the term is “oligopoly,” which sounds distressingly close to “oligarchy.”

Either way, groupthink or worse, I’m worried. A democracy does not work without the free flow of information…and without a news media that actually reports something like news.

Though, there is a small bright spot in all this. To wit, this has been an instructive day for me. And maybe for us all.

Specifically, if this primary has proved one thing, it is that our electoral system is in deep trouble, and has strayed far from the basic principles of democracy.

And an excellent first step to fixing that would be to break up the media oligopoly that controls the news…and with that oligopoly, the insularity of media people it has bred.

Because the alternative would be rather horrible, with the great Fourth Estate transformed into…nothing. Merely the outlet of whatever shared conception (real or illusion) which the Great Powers have decreed to be, in spite of all evidence…

The Truth.

Judged

I am not exactly innocent, but there is a reasonable doubt of guilt.