American "Collective Narcissistic Disorder" (CND)

While there are still serious reporters like Jim Lehrer, Wolf Blitzer and other Walter Cronkite types, most of the cable “news shows” are peopled by multi-million dollar narcissists who, whether on the left at MSNBC or on the right at Fox News are more involved in keeping their fellow CND sufferers in the news. There is nothing newsworthy about Sarah Palin and sadly there never was. She’s way off to the right but who keeps her in the news, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and other so-called lefties. They keep Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Beck, Limbaugh, Coulter, Bachmann in the front page of the MSNBC engines. And their willing counterparts? The above mentioned Foxies do the same for them. I’m not saying they agree to this as though contracted to each other, I’m saying that consciously or subconsciously, they keep each other in their multi-million dollar seats. What do they sell us? ANGER! They sell us anger from their multi-million dollar perches while we feel greater and greater antipathy toward each other and widen the chasm that threatens to swallow our country, Constitution, and all. The anger is addictive and like all addictive substances, even while we know it is destroying us, we somehow arrive in our seats every night, remote in hand waiting for a fix.

I’ve begun an experiment. Each night I go from MSNBC to Fox to hear the double-sided narcissism and then I watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and compare the tone. Try it!

Third Millennium Christianity Part I

Even while school children lay trapped in concrete tombs, with their companions dead and composing in 90 degree heat- even while five stories of a hotel trap 150 UN workers in another tomb- even while people walk in circles dazed, with broken bones, head injuries and missing hands and limbs- even while others lay agonizing with severed legs- even while the dead were stacked like cord wood on the sides of the streets and roads- even with a lack of water and with starvation looming on all sides- and even now as the rats begin to devour human flesh in plain sight- even then the Christo-fascist Pat Robertson suggested that they brought this on themselves by making a deal with the Devil. Even then the bloated caricature of an intellectual Rush Limbaugh used these naked agonies to assail President Obama’s outreach to the Haitian people, and even encouraged us to withhold our monies. I’m not sure what the rest of the people in miniature had to say, Beck, O’Reilly, Coulter, Ingraham, but I hope they find the decency to at least maintain a solemn silence in the face of such utter horror.

The moral bankruptcy of the Right has never been so obvious. The pathetic alliance between the Right and the once great Republican Party, has reduced it from the solid elephant of the GOP to a rodent. Follow rats and you become one. Follow the morally bankrupt and you become them. Profit from liars and well-paid liars at that and you become People of the Lie. Winston Churchill sounded ridiculous warning against fascism in Hitler and so also did Pope Pius XI. Cruelty is at the core of all tyranny… cruelty wrapped in a thin veneer of religious rhetoric… cruelty wrapped in a thin veneer of economic and political policy. The same cruelty which would deny healthcare to the vulnerable here at home would question the political motivations of helping alleviate the horrors of Haiti and other places. Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Coulter, Ingraham, Hannity, and all the Tea Bagging Republican leadership are all rodent wannabes. Sarah Palin is a parasite on the gluttonous wealth generated by the whole yellow journalism industry which keeps people like herself and Beck and Limbaugh in their multi-million dollar seats. “What are the ideas they have with which you disagree?” asks my dearest and oldest friend. None… they have none… what they have are self-centered and self-serving cruelties which they market under the guise of ideas, under the guise of political and economic policy. As the poet W.B. Yeats put it in his poem “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”