November 20, 2016
You know how crazy people often don’t know they’re crazy? Technically it’s called, “lack of insight”.
That is how the tizzy in the press has seemed to me for the past week. Reporters and commentators of nearly every stripe were aghast and alarmed when President Elect Trump and his family decided to go to “21” for dinner without notifying them.
This set off specific discussions among the press, who were already generally horrified at having been utterly unprepared for the eventuality of his election. They were so in the bag for liberals that they had discounted any and all signs that Trump might actually do well at the polls. The real polls, not the pseudo-statistical ones.
Therefore when he “ditched” them (their word, from high school as I recall), and went to dinner with his family, and later when he met in his home with the prime minister of Japan, in transit through NYC, they convinced themselves they were righteously indignant over his breach of what they think of as their “right” to stalk him like paparazzi in pursuit of some half-naked starlet out on the town.
Senior journalists explained with great gravity that the Presidential “pool” is a small selection of press representatives designated to what is known variously as, “the Presidential protection pool” and “the Body Watch”. This, several explained without even gagging, was instigated after the November assassination of JFK in Dallas, and exists so that the public would have immediate access to first-hand eyewitness accounts and photos should some similar catastrophe befall the sitting president. Or, as those who have the good grace to find themselves ashamed of that admission add as an afterthought, should some other newsworthy event intrude upon this particular day of his life. This necessity, they allege, is based upon what they characterize as “the public’s right to know”, as if that phrase included knowing everything, immediately.
One cannot hear this shameful rationale without thinking how ghoulish it sounds.
And from whence did this imaginary right of the public to immediate access arise? A little reflection suggests that the assumption of this non-existent right sprang from the public’s own abandonment of any claim to privacy, as it has, for several years, e-mailed, facebooked, tweeted and insta-thissed and insta-thatted micro-second by micro-second of its own physical and mental state into the internet void.
From which the Fourth Estate appears first to have inferred, then reified, a reciprocal right for everyone to know, this second, everything about the life of another… in this case the president, with or without that person’s assent.
In other words, THEY FUCKING MADE IT UP, because it serves their agenda, to feed the appetite they themselves have created in the public for the consumption of “news” at a rate much higher than actual “news” occurs.
Now, because the press has the attention-span, memory and perspective of a gnat, or because they think we do, they speak of it as if it were a REAL right against which the President-elect has given offense.
Well, it started my day off well. It’s always a pleasure to laugh and shake one’s head at people who think they’re really smart, who are acting stupidly, and who don’t have a clue about it.
END