I put up a post earlier about the demographic profile of those who are susceptible to recruitment by terrorists.  It was less about terrorists, though, than about Trump.  His earliest supporters, it turns out, share that demographic profile.  For those who are interested, the details are here.  For this follow up, I need to point out that all I did regarding the profile of jihadists was to show how it fit the generalization of the Trump demographic.  Everything in the profile itself was old news.  That is important to keep in mind. 

Tonight, I turned on the local news.  They had decided to provide their own coverage of the Orlando atrocity.  So, did they send reporters to either of the world-class Universities, here, to interview experts in terrorism or the Middle East or religious studies or the sociology of radicalism or any of the relevant, academic specializations?  Nope.  Did they visit any of the numerous military installations in the area to get their perspective or talk to their experts or security people?  Nope again.  They went to the local mall and asked people how the story made them feel.    

O.K., it’s local news.  What do you expect?  It’s embarrassing, stomach-turning incompetence, but it’s what local, network affiliates do.  What I did not expect were the responses they got.

At first, they seemed content to use up air time with variations on the theme of “Oh, that was so horrible.”  Not particularly enlightening, but exactly what the producers wanted, I’m sure.  They also, though, showed more than a few questions, directed at the camera man I guess, that could only have come from someone who had never ventured beyond their neighborhood and had no curiosity about anything.  “What makes everyone so angry?”  “Why can’t people just love one another?”  “What do they expect to gain?” “What makes someone do something like that?”

They clearly had tapped into some deep well of trifling superficiality and inane shallowness.  These could not be actual responses from eligible votes.  That would be unthinkable in a post-9/11 America.  I waited for the late news but changed the channel: different location, same prattle.

Now, it may not have been this bad in fact.  Maybe this just is the mentality of those few, very few we can hope, people who would willingly allow a camera crew to record their banalities.  Maybe the crew actually got a good number of thoughtful responses that were later rejected by editors or directors.  And yes, at bottom, it’s just local news, and this is exactly the kind of meaningless drivel that is their stock and trade.  It’s all that makes the chatter between their anchors look coherent.  But television pushes this blather on people day in and day out.  It tells us that these are appropriate responses in the wake of horrific tragedy, that they are representative of the way we should think and behave.

If we still are at this stage, if questions about why they are so angry or where has all the love gone are representative of the body politic, then we don’t really care about terrorism or politics or government.  We might pretend to be scared of terrorists, we might pretend to want a proto-fascist clown to deal with them, but it’s all really a just a distraction to most of us.  None of the people on those news broadcasts, probably including the anchors, could possibly have given ISIS or jihad or terrorism more than a superficial, passing thought.  No one who had invested more thought than that would have demonstrated such cretinous imbecility for broadcast.  And that is all that was broadcast.   

I don’t have a closing for this.  No words of concern, no ideas, not even questions.  I am dismayed beyond the capacity to do more than file this as a simple, unconstructive rant. 

“Why are they so angry?” — an American voter.    

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."  ― Thomas Jefferson