Criticism and faulty anger management have a confused relationship in our time. It is often difficult to distinguish one from the other when one lives in a time of diminished expectations. I suppose that if one had the trappings of a child once again it might come down to being fed too much junk food with the resultant sour stomach. Perhaps the underlying instigator here is that those entities that assemble and process the news of the day do not differ in any substantial manner from the organizations that sell you your cereal or your cars? In fact when you see too many paper inserts, drug commercials or pop up windows, it is hard to see the possibility of one without the other?
So in our supposedly well-stocked lifestyle appeasing paradise, ala Edward Louis Bernays, you would think that most all of the news of the day would be ‘good’. Yet the opposite appears to be the case. The headlines seem to endlessly scream out trauma and outrage in ceaseless infamies and disappointments. To take any given news story and trace them through to their source, so many outlets are found to have merely multiple rubber stamps of the same article. The myriad of cloned faces alternately choking on grievous emotion one instant and shifting to idiotic frivolity the next all to many times reciting the same exact text. The audience like a swarm of bees having their hive mischievous sullied by naughty children is defaulted to a constant state of brooding discontent.
Pundits abound in innumerable commentary columns and blogs like this one to lambast and correct unsavory pronouncements with the impression of providing a loftier view of a morass of more of the same clogging the means of communication ahead. But is this as a result of too much that has gone wrong in our larger experience? Or is it simply symptomatic of the goals of the news gatherers to wield their stinging prods to move the faceless herds of humanity in the suitable direction? Constantly guiding them to the conclusion that they and the society they inhabit are lacking and need some form of officially sanctioned specialist to help?
Suddenly, without warning, my embroiled mind unexpectedly begins to fill with the strains of ‘drummer’ Henry Hill’s ever strident warnings of “trouble” and the sarcastically posed comebacks of his mighty adversary, Marian ‘Librarian’ Paroo. The restless adolescent feet of Meredith Wilson’s, “Music Man” stamp forth blaring its concluding high school melody proclaiming the simple virtues of baseball, motherhood, apple pie, and of course, Capitalism. For perhaps it it only an ongoing game for these institutions of the press to simply focus on what’s bad as exemplified by the miniscule numbers of society’s fringes and then counterpoint them with equally noxious trivialities the combination fostering fear, disgust and ultimately apathy within the ‘Hickville’ mom and pop audience?
Exist Ants 