Friday, November 11, 2016

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.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Milk

Whole milk is wholesome.
That's what makes it whole.
This, I insist, is the whole truth. 

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

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!