I’m an atheist, but I don’t care about being an atheist, know what I mean? So as always it was with a little burst of surprise to learn this year that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is Jewish, it never occurred to me to wonder, I just don’t ever use a religious prism when viewing Americans.
That was the column where I learned every member of a synagogue he attended raised their hands when they thought of leaving America for another homeland, the place has become so ugly and frightening for our Jewish people.
I thought about him and how hurtful and intimidating America can be for our little people as I read his latest work about how American journalism has pathetically once again blown a national election, this time in the beyond-absurd condition they could predict the future that Republicans were going to tsunami those liberals into electoral oblivion in the 2022 midterms.
I and many others have been saying with varying degrees of loud volume for 20 years the American political journalism corps is a joke, a regressive bunch of corporate lemmings who don’t give a damn about the little people, ridiculously conflate their mission of truth into somehow a justification of narrative power politics while actively disliking liberalism and the Democratic Party.
Obviously none of it has made a whit of difference to the behavior of our awful journalists. Perhaps if they finally take a good hard look at who they are and what they’ve done from one of their own, a guy who made it to the pinnacle of his profession at the Washington Post, well, maybe they’ll grow and change. Right?
At this point one instantly, correctly assumes of course they won’t and the tools of embarrassment and blunt bludgeoning of truth will be used, this time on journalists David Brooks and Catherine Rampell, I could professionally and intellectually smash them back to the professional kindergarten they belong to for their Election 2022 journalism but I won’t.
I’m tired of being a diction badass of truth to these fools, it doesn’t gratify me, they’ll just instantly dismiss me as a partisan and it wouldn’t work anyway, absolutely nothing changes them, they see themselves, amazingly, as arbiters of the truth and are accountable to nothing and no one.
What I will do is put on my List buying 2 dozen roses with good greens to give away to a local Jewish Temple, let them know there are many folks out there who value their humanity and gifts to us. This is completely common behavior for me, I’m always giving away roses, I have 75 canes out front and in winter use a fine florist, their rose special is on Thursday, I could do it today.
Does that surprise you? I suppose one could think from my political essays I am a pugnacious, arrogant, critical citizen among us. To think so would be to think one could predict political midterms, I am a tiny, flawed person with many shortcomings who is unfailingly polite and courteous to all, holding doors for women and waving at cops. I know full well what the American authoritarian state can do to the powerless, I sympathize with how hard life can be here, I see it as a small life mission to perform tiny things I can do to make life better for everyone.
I and the country can only thrive forward with the truth in the world, The New York Times, Washington Post and the rest of the beltway media keep blowing their mission and hurting the country backward to Wiemar Germany. Their denial is legendary, they will not change, and the America they’ve given me for this day is trying to assure frightened, hurt Americans this is still their place, there are basely decent people here who welcome their presence, of course.
It never occurred to me growing up we could reach a place like this. Maybe if the American journalism corps starts reporting the truth in the present and stops trying to predict the future we’ll start getting out of it.