THE NEWS.
I want to talk about something we USers don't talk about. I want to talk about a problem.

USers no longer have problems. Problems are indicators of trouble. USers don't want to have troubles. We all know that--because, God Blesses America, we have no problems. The most difficult things we ever have are issues. So I suppose I am being troublesome by insisting on talking about a problem. I suppose I am becoming an issue.

Here's today's problem. Most nights lately I turn on the television. I choose between games: athletics, or politics. They are both presented as entertainment. For sports programs, I can turn off the sound--the idiot announcers saying nothing that makes any sense--and enjoy the play. Politics doesn't have anything I can enjoy; the candidates, though mostly respectable, are forced to suffer through this nonsensically long campaign in which nothing makes sense, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars that could much better be spent on basic services for prospective voters. The commentators talk of candidates "slogging it out"--whatever that means!--in various pugalistic encounters, and pillory them for their pimples without ever checking to see if they have major intellectual, social, or moral problems. By November the USer electorate will probably be dumber than it was before the campaign season started.

What is called "the news" in the US is just more of what we call "entertainment." And like the entertainment, the news is mostly bad. Entertainment depends of what the industry calls "personalities," and that's what news programming in America has become. The networks however, aren't even entertaining. The anchors--particularly at CBS--have been chosen for image rather than intelligence or understanding. CNN offers us Lou Dobbs as a thoughtful man, Wolff Blitzer as a serious investigator and explicator. Blitzer and Larry King Live are supposed to be deeply thoughtful interviewers who ask "tough questions"--like "Is that so?"

The athletes I see generally are good athletes.. Very, very good, for the most part. The coaches and managers seem competent. The sports commentators, however, are utter idiots. But they are no worse than the political commentators. And at least the sports commentators don't congratulate themselves every other breath on being the best in the business; only the cartoon characters at CNN do that.

The sports announcers talk too much, and rarely say anything. The news commentators and analysts don't know how to say anything, even if they knew anything to say. They are like the sports commentators in their dedication to crisis mentality; they add to that their determination to underscore insignificances, misstate even the obvious, and conflate evidence and opinion. They also seem to find something worth giggling about in almost every story they cover--to help us avoid taking anything seriously, I suppose, or to excuse their idiocy.

Maybe part of the problem is that the commentators are expected to speak extemporaneously. About ninety-five percent of them are incapable of such. The most profound things any of them ever say turn out to be tautologies.

And now the news folks want to recruit us to join them, to contribute our bits of news or what might be news. Maybe we could raise the level of reporting for them--but they would have to comment on our comments, and would no doubt garble them.

Bert