Fake News - The Corn Pone, Chowder, And Ribs Of American Democracy

There is either no such thing as fake news or everything if fake news.  Take your choice. Browning, Durrell, Kurosawa, and legions of defense attorneys have proven without a doubt that what one person sees is not what everyone sees.  All reality is a matter of perception and it, therefore, not reality at all. 

In a famous drive-by murder case, a number of eye-witnesses were assembled to tell what they saw; and while prosecutors were convinced that there was only one true, correct version, the opposite was true.  One witness said the car was blue, the shooter was black, and the day overcast.  The second said that the shooter was white, the car was black and day bright and sunny; and the third said that it all happened so fast that he couldn't tell for sure the race of the shooter, the make and color of the car, or the weather that day. 

At a recent Christmas dinner, Alphonse Imperati told tales of his grandfather Giuseppe, a prince of a man who had worked his way out of Little Italy to make something of himself.  The rest of the gathering smiled patiently, but when three bottles of Chianti had been drunk, they all called out Alphonse for his febrile dreams.  Old Giuseppe was a crook, a swindler, a cheat, and an abased exploiter of his own people. 

Alphonse, drunk as a skunk on the Chianti, the Asti Spumante, and the anisette, stood up to orate in defense of his forbear as one diner after another talked of the Buick that Giuseppe had dumped into Newark harbor for the insurance money, the numbers he ran, and the shakedowns he happily undertook for the padrino of Wooster Square, Don Cicci. 

 

'It wasn't a Buick', said Patti La Bella. 'It was a Caddie.  I knew the Petruccis.  The police found the car only half sunk in the mud, the harbor was so full of cars dumped not by Giuseppe and Herbie the Hook'. 

And so it went until every story had made the rounds, embellished, refined, retold until it had no resemblance whatsoever to that which Alphonse started with. 

Now, everyone knows that CNN is fake news, peddling anti-Trump propaganda left and right; and MSNBC, bottoming out in the Nielsen ratings, does CNN one better conflating the President's actions with the worst of Adolf Hitler, Mao Tze Dung and Pol Pot combined. 

'Who believes that shit', said B. Bobby Turnbull, media advisor to Karoline Levitt, Trump's Press Secretary, and avant garde for the Administration's war on fake news. 'Why are we even bothering?'; but he was told to keep up the drumbeat, to keep hammering away at the inventions, the preposterousness, and the vanity of the legacy media 

Now, even the most passionate progressive had to wince whenever mulleted, chicken necked, Al Sharpton showed up.  This a pompous and ridiculous race-bating ambulance-chasing fraud was the face of MSNBC - a man never more than a few steps from racial incidents, a bullying blowhard when innocent black men were 'lynched' by white police. 

 

'Today we have seen slavery, Jim Crow, endemic racism, and black hatred as never before', intoned Sharpton in his editorial on MSNBC. 'White supremacy has never before been in such evidence today as the Trump Gestapo in a Kristallnacht pogrom of indefinable horror...'

'Horse shit', said Bobby Turnbull, ashamed at himself for even looking at the monitor in the gym when that race-bating imposter showed up, 

Turnbull flipped the channel to Fox News and got a breather.  Here was the truth, the veracity, the way it actually happened not what that wharf rat implied.  The police were heroes, brothers in arms. Of course since legacy television is all about viewership, contention, partisanship, and anger are its stock in trade.  You can't or shouldn't believe what they say any more than if you were watching MSNBC

But that fairness doctrine simply doesn't apply any more. Passionate belief is the generator of revenue. The more outrageously racist Al Sharpton is, the higher the ratings for MSNBC given the down-and-forever-liberal viewership. 

Fake news? We thrive on it. No one wants Walter Cronkite and The Evening News when the country is at peril. Faithful progressives tune in not because they want a reasoned, dispassionate accounting of the news but for the entertainment value of ball-cutting political hatred.  Rachel Maddow, recently cashiered darling of the Left, was why viewers turned in.  They wanted to be inspired by this butch, nasty bitch of a partisan.  Fuck reasonability - meaningless in the age of The Usurper. 

The Right has its media champions and while it is great fun to watch selective, hand-picked absurdities, it has no more claim to The Truth than the man in the moon.  Television is and always been a medium for selling mouthwash or Greek vacations or vaginal fresheners; and to do so it must pander to its base. Anyone looking for the truth is just whistlin' Dixie. 

But Trump has a point.  For over ten years the Left and its media shills have tried everything to shame, discredit, accuse, and vilify the man - all to no avail.  He has had frivolous court cases dismissed and gone after politically corrupt prosecutors. He, through actions not words, has shown the worth of his policies. 'America First' is not fascist, nationalistic meme, but a grounded policy to restore American political integrity. The rest is bullshit, fake news, and arrogant newsroom fantasy. 

America wants fake news.  The era if there ever was one of objectivity, reasonability, and sanity is long passed.  We live in a virtual, mediated world were the truth has disappeared in a whirlwind jamboree of fake news dressed up as opinion and point of view; and we love it.  Objectivity is tedious and boring, penitential at best.  We know what we know, so why all this pretentious academic fol-de-rol? Better to revel in unhinged opinion; better to wallow in the mud and come up renewed than be forced to parse, deconstruct, and find abstruse meaning. 

Life is too short for all that. We can't all be Nietzschean Übermensch, but better to ride herd over something, as venal and shapeless as it might be, than to relax on a chaise lounge somewhere. Donald Trump is the devil incarnate, so the call to action is obvious. 

Of course that is nonsense, the imaginative daydreams of old social justice warriors.  Nothing is what it seems, and the more we become perceptual relativists like Kurosawa and Browning, the better.