Can I still be shocked? Can you? Is it still possible? If nothing else, my constant infusion of news—on television, radio, the internet and, yes, even in print—has impacted my worldview. But has it changed what shocks me? Has it altered my threshold for determining what is credible? I think we’re dangerously close to ‘anything goes’ with a hard stop to the reign of old norms when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927 to 2003, represented New York state 1977 to 2001) said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
The political news in the U.S. is leaping from ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962 & 2004) to ‘Wag the Dog’ (1997) with dashes of ‘All the King’s Men’ (1949) and a deep desire that ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976) will cut through the fog and reveal facts without a skewed lens. I keep hoping that “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939) and rescues us from the endless insanity.
News on the environmental front is ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (2004) with floods, fire and drought. The end of the world is nigh and yet people are still worried about the Queen of England’s relationship with her grandson, which semi-celebrity will be next in the cast of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and the latest diet that will make us all Hollywood skinny.
Can I still be shocked? Yes, but it’s getting harder. There are only so many times you can reach for the smelling salts before you realize that reality has pushed its way toward fiction and some of it is distinctly dystopian. There are a few comedic threads, but the overall storyline is scary. If five years ago you told me that Trump (best known outside the New York area for his reality TV show and inside the region as a real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies & scandals) would, as president, lean on the recently elected president of another country (formerly a comedian playing the president of that country) asking for dirt on a political opponent while withholding military aid authorized by Congress, I’d think you were nuts!
But here we are…
Yes, I can be shocked and as the news rushes toward unimagined scenarios too close to fiction, I’m waiting for the Monty Python moment when it all makes silly sense. Maybe it’s time to see ‘Life of Brian’ (1979) again?
I’m reminded of that old cliche about the frog in the pot not noticing as the water temperature is gradually raised to boiling. It’s not true though. In real life, that poor frog eventually notices that things are starting to /hurt/, but it’s stuck in a pot with the lid on and can’t get out.
We can, but unlike that frog, we explain away the hurt as a ‘good thing’. Or perhaps as an ‘in the future thing’. Or perhaps some of us do know the end is nigh but feel powerless to fight back…
I know the good people out number the idiots, but right at this moment, the idiots are winning. Heaven help us all.
You’ve nailed it! The frog in the pot that is gradually heating up is the perfect image. The earth’s atmosphere is heating up, the rhetoric is heating up, the fog of gas-lighting is altering the obvious (aka truthful) narratives and here we are in dystopia.