A cogent, sobering take on where we are today, from Steve Jimenez:
Good morning, Mark.
I made the mistake of waking up and reading the NYT. The first story, “America Stands Alone,” makes me realize (again) that the lens through which they as a media organization view the world and my own analyses are as starkly different as night and day. They point to two factors as central to America’s failure dealing with Covid: individualism and the incompetence of the Trump administration. No mention of our crappy, for-profit health care system that is just as corrupt as the rest of the Corporate/National Security State. And no mention, of course, of the Big Pharma Industrial Complex.
In the meantime, the short Biden video you sent out yesterday is a chilling reminder of how dark, depraved, and utterly surreal this moment is. The fact that the Democratic and media establishments are rallying behind this pathetic figure who keeps muttering “Hey, man” between garbled, incoherent phrases is another indicator of the precipice on which we now find ourselves. No wonder that our crazed society is looking to the likes of Fauci or Bill Gates for answers when the political class is cannibalizing itself before our eyes. The 2020 “election” makes the spectacle of 2016 look like child’s play. Obama’s sentimentalized, Disney-fied, deceptive victory in 2008 appears to be ancient history. And the NYT continues to cover up the corrupt, fraudulent “inside jobs” that have us devolving from a crumbling republic and empire to a nascent police state.
The liberal Left is concerned with defunding the police. The “police” I’m worried about are Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and yes, the NYT and Big Pharma, who want to force-feed us their “community standards“ and neoliberal do-good-ism. Our right to free speech is being pissed on more and more, and many of us keep looking the other way, focused instead on virtue-signaling gestures around “social justice.” My smart playwright friend coined the perfect description: the Power of Babble.
The empty suit with his “Hey, man” jive talk — and those who enable him — worry me more than Trump’s malignant narcissism. We know only too well what the latter looks like and the damage that’s been done; but the former is equally (if not more) deranged and deceptive. We’re about to find out once again (at potentially far greater cost) that the highway to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions — and mythic innocence — will not see us through this time.
My point is, the NYT continues to bloviate about Trump as Rome burns. And how hollow that “Hey, Man” shtick sounds as another November approaches.
New York Times link: https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?uri=nyt://newsletter/cf756503-f8e8-5bb6-9028-b7e8791dec0f&productCode=NN&te=1&nl=the-morning&emc=edit_nn_20200807