News media

News media for the most part 

tells truth like advertising

diluted and adulterated 

yet never quite untrue

and so it is at its best 

serving demagoguery

which the gullible public 

swallowing it all up

sadly promotes its doing.  

Sensation sells.

Social media in this digital age

propagates news in fragments 

emotionally loaded like sound bites

without rational argumentation

and diminishes truth even more. 

Sensation screams.
Sensation smears.

Media has been degrading

democracy into mediacracy

and will undoubtedly help it
corrupt into mobocracy.

What are we to do, oh what to do.

As when lost in a deep forest

we must walk on bravely

even if we are not sure which way 
alert to any sign of escape
for if we stall we perish.

Milk

Whole milk is wholesome.

That's what makes it whole.

This, I insist, is the whole truth. 

Trumpet Morn

The morning after the Presidential Election 2016, a friend wrote me: Devastating, dismal, and, as that vile hateful non-person likes to say, ‘it's a disaster’.  She followed up with her thoughtful comments that reflected my own thoughts, and I wrote this reply: 

Dismal, devastating, downright disastrous. . . indeed.  

You've said all -- the complicit media, the manipulative electorate, the divisive two-party system, and the campaign oligarchy -- and said it all so well.

A glimmer of consolation is that, unconscionably contradictory, Trump may not act out everything he blabbered about in his campaign demagoguery, and the Republican Party, if it regains some sense, may yet domesticate the bigot in power. Or, else, we will have a Hitler reborn and the repressive society modeled after his, or, at best, the return of the McCarthy Era.  

Trump's art of instilling fear and thus magnifying anxiety among the populace replicated that of Hitler in 1930, and yet journalists, either afraid or ignorant, never said so all through the shameful campaign.  To borrow Sinclair Lewis’ words in the title of his 1935 novel, "It Can't Happen Here," and yet it did then (in fiction) and it well could now (in reality).  

Dreary, deleterious, downright depressing.  Aaaagh!