Moronification…

and the lost art of thinking….

A coin actually has three sides, not two; heads, tails, and the edge, though it’s highly unlikely to land on the edge when tossed. Human intelligence and politics often seem to resemble the coin, with the well thought out and rational representing the edge. It’s not that human beings are stupid, any more than a 100 watt light bulb is dark, but each can warrant its negative assessment when used incorrectly or not at all.

The daily news is supposedly a condensed report of what has transpired during the preceding twenty four hours, but it can also serve as a telling caricature of who has been using the light bulb as a hammer, etcetera.

While remaining up to date on real world events may have suffered recently, the amusement and eyebrow-raising asininity quotient has been well served indeed.

Take the Breaking News thing, for example. As proof that the reference fits “like bark on a log”, to borrow a ruralism from an old Blue Ridge acquaintance of mine, I really don’t need to comment further, for most people to know exactly of what I speak and why.

…..But, I will. One would be hard pressed to explain why a global news organization would spend two weeks picking through a haystack in search of a needle and providing everything but DNA analysis of each sprig of dead plant life encountered. Jon Stewart’s parody of CNN’s tedious moronification of the Malaysian airliner tragedy serves as punctuation to that thought.

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In another case, it was the worm-brained precipitating event itself which provided sad evidence that the brains of some people in positions of authority are located in very close proximity to the pocket in which a guy usually carries his wallet. I’m referring, of course, to the hoity-toity Colorado school from which a nine year old girl was suspended for shaving her head in support of a friend suffering from stage 4 cancer.

An institution of learning supposedly aims to provide a child with knowledge and to foster growth of the wisdom required to use that knowledge well. I could not get beyond the question regarding exactly what that child must have learned from the unthinking, knee-jerk action by the school’s administrators when faced with the task of applying the school’s dress policy to the situation.

I envisioned the metaphor about a parent teaching little Johnny to not hit his little brother with the toy truck by whacking little Johnny with the toy truck.

Fortunately, the school (actually, the adult human beings running the joint) did what most reasonable people do when they walk face-first into a shit-storm; they turned around and went the other way. It remains to be seen whether the Board of Directors will change their thinking or will simply stick with an expedient change of direction.

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….Speaking of moronification, the “giant sucking sound” of today isn’t the rapid migration of jobs to Mexico of Ross Perot’s mid-nineties opposition to NAFTA, but the sound of the media collectively giving president Obama a hickey for his effort to promote the alleged healthcare plan bearing his name. The moronic quotient is kept aloft by the fact that people may actually be starting to march in step to some degree, and by the sycophancy of an institution historically known otherwise for its pedantic examination and assessment of government activities. While I’m sure the various editors are inundated with an endless cascade of “releases” issued by countless federal Obamacare toadies, I find it to be unforgivable that whether they bury an item in Journalism Purgatory or plaster it across the top half of Page One, none of the “attaboy” stories reporting how many people have “signed up” for the government mandated daisy chain happens to point out that it isn’t “voluntary” by any stretch of the imagination, or of the Orwellian Thesaurus, either, for that matter…

 

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