Yes, yes, and uh... Yes.
Go Mark Morford!
Whatever the reason, news fatigue is rampant right now. Do you feel it? Have you succumbed? My media colleagues complain of it and regular readers lament it almost every day: people are, apparently and quite understandably, deathly sick of the media and sick of the news.
Sick of depressing headlines and sick of Bush and sick of war and sick, more than anything, of reading about the latest toxic government agenda, given how the overall situation, at least as far as the last four years are concerned, never seems to improve and never seems to lighten and never seems to lose its sheen of bleak and black anxiety. Can you relate?
Much to the GOP's delight, liberals and progressives across the land seem to be off their game right now, not reading as much and not following the media as closely and not really questioning the snide BushCo agenda that aggressively, barely able to tolerate even the slightest glimpse of Bush without a spiritual and physical gag, a karmic acid reflux, a sucker punch in the intellectual gut.
Especially true given how the man has almost single-handedly poisoned the spiritual pie and soiled the progressive pool and pretty much slammed a bloody cleaver down the middle of the nation, making the place livable only in the cities and educated college towns, the urban archipelago, places with funky bookstores and decent universities and food that isn't, by default, deep fried or reconstituted or slathered in liquid cheese.
[...]
Of course we're exhausted. Of course we don't want to hear it any more. It's a decidedly fatalistic feeling, after Bush snuck in to Term II, that there's little that can be done and we might as well just hunker down and wait for it all to be over because, after the valiant and heartbreaking battle of last November, much hope has been lost.
This, then, is the irony. Because now is the time when vigilance is needed more than ever, when an informed populace and an outraged resistance is mandatory lest the current regime simply steam roll over the nation for the next 1,460 days with a blindly aggressive agenda, one that aims to decimate Social Security and gut the economy and flood the courts with rabidly homophobic and anti-choice Bible-thumping judges who will almost guarantee we start treating gays as abominations and women as chattel and progressives as flammable godless heathens all over again.
And let's not forget, there's another vital election in less than two years that could very well reshape Congress and make Bush's final two years much more thorny and difficult, and that could very well help further highlight the fact that he will go down in history as one of the most destructive, least articulate, most divisive presidents in American history. Place your bets now.
So, then. It's OK to take a break. It's OK to, in the wake of the deeply nauseating Bush re-election, stay away, refocus, recharge, focus inward and focus locally and focus on living your own life with the kind of temerity and resolve that you normally prescribe to rabid evangelicals from Kentucky. Never think you have all the answers. But just know that you know how to ask the right kind of questions.
I've been trying to say that to myself since November 3rd, 2004.
posted by claudine |Added at
2:16 PM| |
politics mark morford
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