Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, May 17, 2013

I'll retire to Bedlam . . .


As I have mentioned now and again, I am afflicted with a lengthy commute, during which I tend to OD on National Pubic Radio. (Did I commit a typo?) Lately it's been absolutely unendurable -- nothing but an endless stream of ridiculous bullshit about how ordinary imperfect operations of government are the worst thing since Hitler or something. Meanwhile, stuff is happening in the world that you know, actually matters, but we obviously don't need to know about it.

Sure, as Ezra Klein lays out very clearly, perhaps with a bit too much restraint, it's all about nothing, so he expects it just to go away. Unfortunately, it is completely irrelevant whether any of this crap is meaningful, has anything to do with president Obama, or is even wrong. If the Republicans keep talking about it, and the corporate media keeps channeling everything they say and Cokie and Mara keep yammering on about how the Obama presidency has now officially failed, well then -- that will be the reality.

There's nothing we can do about it.


4 comments:

C. said...

Masochist, listening to NPR. I flat out refused to listen yesterday. I wait until 6pm when the Albany NY station starts its half hour of local news, then I can usually listen to Marketplace without screaming at the radio.
I do enjoy writing bitingly sarcastic emails to the ombudsman at NPR.

C. Corax said...

I think I hit return instead of shift. The above was from me.

toko baju muslim said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Don Quixote said...

NPR officially died in 1991, during the first Iraq atrocity that the US committed, by failing to report on what was actually happening. To quote Maurice Chevalier, "I remember it well" . . . the only way to read about our massacre of over 400 women and children in the bomb shelter at Amiryeh was to read The Nation. The final "turkey shoot" (as one Apache chopper operator described our mowing down, at night with special vision technology, of thousands of people as they tried to flee to safety)--same story. NPR just caved--"Okay, we'll be 'embedded.'"

And now, we have Scott Simon on weekends, sounding like Dr. Evil, asking banal questions and laughing pretentiously at his own non-humor . . . Peter Sagal thinking that he's funny [I call the show "Wait, wait, don't listen (to this shit)].

NPR commentators are smug, ignorant, self-important, lacking in keen intelligence and wit, and pathetic in general. It is a sad, sad state of affairs.

But at least the FCC protects us--unlike those obscene Canadians--from hearing words like "shit" and "fuck" on radio and TV.

The true obscenity is our mass-murdering and polluting of the world's people and environment, and the corporate media's complicity in it. And in the meantime, Bush and Cheney run free while pot smokers go to prison. Apparently smoking a joint is a crime, whereas leading your nation into war (and, in all likelihood in Cheney's case, facilitating the destruction of buildings in NYC to achieve that end) is not.