You know that thing we've all been saying for years, that is documented nine ways from Sunday and that no one who is not clinically insane disputes? Well, thank God we can now set aside our deep-seated doubts about it, because we've been vindicated by having that same thing said by a Very Serious Person in a mass medium. To be specific, Media Hack #3725 - not to be mistaken for Media Hack #3275, whose voice should also carry great weight with us - has printed an op ed containing something vaguely resembling human thought. Huzzah! It doesn't change the vast volume of Republican propaganda printed and broadcast throughout the media, including in the rest of the op-ed's publication; it won't change one iota of the political calculus in Washington or the rest of the country; and it won't stop one Republican from committing one crime, or move one corrupt right-wing pervert to resign...but it sure does give me the warm-fuzzies for one of the umpteen jillion corporate media hydra-heads to give passing lip service to common sense.
What would we do without the mass media to clue us in about whether 2 + 2 does indeed equal 4? Clearly we don't have much faith in our own ability to know and promote these facts independently, given how much energy is spent here and on other liberal websites exhaustively spotlighting what some meaningless mouthpiece or other has said either for or against what we support. Talk Radio Host #7216 reiterated Republikkkan Talking Point #32581-c for a third time today? Oh the humanity! I'm shocked, shocked at this fresh and totally unexpected outrage, even more so than I was when it happened five minutes ago or the five minutes before that!
Op-Ed Columnist #8211 said something vaguely resembling reality, or even dared to take a moderate position rather than cribbing North Korean-style propaganda on behalf of the conservative ideology of corruption? Pass me the smelling salts! I'm getting the vapors! Some old-time conservative columnist has chastized the Khmer Douche teahadists currently running the GOP? Oh lawdy lawd, the rapture is upon us! Some people might think investing this much Kremlinology into the most superficial disagreements of distant, totemic figures with no actual power or influence is a sign of abject weakness, moral dissolution, and desperate avoidance of addressing real challenges. But not me!
No, I am so encouraged to hear that some Reagan administration jackass is slightly uncomfortable with the trajectory of the psychotic circus freaks now carrying their agenda toward its natural conclusion. I am tickled pink when a brand-name columnist says something that doesn't read like it belongs in a psychiatrist's notes, and even more heartened when the rest of us see their doing so as a Rec List-worthy revelation of tremendously important events transpiring. One could almost forget that the best of these Very Serious People merely plagiarize and water down the thoughts and ideas of people who actually know what they're talking about - years late and dozens of IQ points the lesser - and largely do so only to lend cheap credibility to post-journalist "news" organizations. Who cares if the first 40 pages of a publication are a bunch of bought-and-paid-for AP newswire stenography and GOP fiction, as long as there's some four-paragraph sop to post-medieval civilization in the Opinion or Arts & Entertainment section?
A lot of us seem to be operating under the delusion that this crap means anything, or that these people represent something. It doesn't, and they don't. It's a bunch of mirrors reflecting the money that comes into an organization, and believe it or not, we account for some of that money - ergo, we get some of that content. Only it's not reporting anything we don't know: That would involve investing their own money into investigative journalism - a term that is as obsolete in modern news as the clanking of a typewriter. They permit token moderates to speak their minds, occasionally, and to more rarely allow a liberal to speak on some social issue, and that's the hook to draw weak liberals who can't comprehend that they are the source of their own politics into contributing social credibility to a corrupt enterprise.
It's about time we realized and understood that none of these infotainment sources add a damn thing to what we do and what we seek to accomplish. They are warped mirrors, and if your response is to simply mirror them back, what you get is nothing - whatever tiny modicum of light spontaneously occurs between the two reflective surfaces bounces and distorts back and forth ad infinitum into background heat and entropy, signifying nothing and availing nothing but to drain useful thought and effort. And meanwhile, the people you're fighting aren't reading any of the drivel consuming your time, and they certainly aren't expending any significant proportion of their energy desperately Kremlinologizing it in search of opaque clues about the state of things. They're too busy shaping the actual state of things to give a shit about what narrative is invented around it, at least until there is some clear pathway between the narrative and the real-world manifestation - something we haven't seemed too concerned about since the "reality-based community" went out the window because real-world achievements became too boring to either support or reward.
I'll search credible sources for facts, but I don't give a flying, cartwheeling, barrel-rolling fuck what some professional cocktail party attendant claims to think about anything in return for a paycheck, least of all whether they've spontaneously realized the obvious after everyone actually doing any thinking or taking any action has moved on. Headline 1965: "Hitler May Not Be a Good Guy After All, Some WW2 Vets Say." There was a brief period where Daily Kos was occasionally considered a source of information unto itself, and our people were quoted in major media. That was a time when we understood intuitively that it's our opinions that matter, because we act on them - not those of people for whom opinion is merely a commodity whose content fluctuates with supply and demand, every bit as perverse and meaningless in itself as Orwell's Newspeak.
Get this through your head if you intend to be free: You don't need to hear someone agree with you to know you're right, and you especially don't need the approval of people who are beneath you and stand for the degradation of everything you value. If they agree with you, then good for them; and if they don't, then that detracts from their credibility, because you are the one judging it, not someone else and not some "authority" who only has that position because they work for an institution with money. If you perceive yourself as some morally empty non-entity who needs constant encouragement and social approval to vigorously pursue your own values, then you are no good to those values - you're just another drowning person clinging to a notion in hope that someone stronger than you who actually has those values won't be as weak. We have more than enough mirrors and empty vessels in this society to parasite off the unwarily vain, cowardly, and hollow. Be The Source of the change you want to see, and you cannot be denied.