The Chris Moeller Archives

9-11 at 15

2016 has seen the complete and utter collapse of the traditional news media in this country, along with much of our sanity. Bizarrely, I think we have Donald Trump, largely, to thank for this, although whistle blowing leakers of courage held a detonator, as did lying politicians who’ve given all of us so much for which to be cynical. Trump’s campaign has been a direct repudiation of the establishment media, exposing it as fraudulent even to those in the nation’s hinterlands that don’t spend their evenings concerning themselves with whether or not Matt Lauer deserves to be revered. In the cultural arena, Trump's ultimate legacy will be having welcomed white supremacist and nativist groups back into the open, and I, for one, consider that a positive thing. Where there is light, there is no secrecy. It wasn't Trump's noble ambition. His motive was greed. But now we see who you all are, and holy shit, there are a lot of you.

Hiding behind the flag and mindless patriotism isn't playing anymore, though, as reactionaries watch the activists take to the streets, impervious to danger. The Have Nots have had it. Can you remember a more bizarre September 11th than the one we experienced on Sunday? This one was most notable for the protests against police brutality that took place on professional football fields. The patriotism police must be altogether flummoxed. Their attempts to shame and discredit the agents of social progress have lost all strength. How much authority do you have to scold when your political standard-bearer is running against the Iraq War you defended, against the Washington neo-con establishment that played you for suckers? You're admitting to the world that you were wrong (and meanwhile, here are the Dixie Chicks, still touring). What the hell just happened? Nobody feels like organizing a red, white, and blue parade. The reactionary right can’t attack the left for its purported lack of patriotism when the best presidential candidate they can come up calls Bush the Decider a loser and says that prisoners of war are actually not heroes. It's a dissociative identity disorder. If you couldn't still work out your demons by going onto social media and calling an NFL quarterback "a burrhead asshole," as one of my friend's friends did, you'd have to order up a butterfly net for yourself.

The news media doesn’t know how to handle any of the chaos. The desk anchors didn't pay to get those head shots done only to get so much abuse lumped onto them. They’re getting attacked on all sides-- alternately accused of permitting the lunatic Trump to “mainstream” xenophobia, and then of ignoring the colorful stories behind Hillary Clinton’s compromised candidacy. (Both are true accusations, incidentally.) No doubt American news reporters long for the day when they-- or more accurately, their predecessors-- held the respect of the citizenry, those days when a shiny smile could flaunt his or her journalistic celebrity proudly at dinner parties in Washington and Manhattan. Now, nobody gives a shit. Conservatives hate one media conglomerate, liberals another, and the audience for each has been pared down to a size that essentially qualifies as a cult. Few Americans can name more than one or two members of the United States Supreme Court, but fewer still could tell you which empty suits are currently hosting the CBS, NBC, or ABC evening news. What does their celebrity even mean for them anymore? They’re careerists in a business that gives off such a stink, they might as well be congressional representatives. Directly related, the Trump phenomenon is not a hard one to explain. He’s deeply unpopular with an enormous cross-section of the American population, but the campaign is built upon his direct confrontation with the nation’s news media, and that institution is even more unpopular than he is.

Today's journos are in a knot of their own tying, helpless to defend themselves against charges that they are protecting Hillary Clinton on behalf of the nation’s ruling Washington/Wall Street cabal. (She has been successfully vetted already, but he's still hustling for the oligarchy's endorsement.) There is a clear video made public this week of a frighteningly-frail Clinton wobbling to the sidewalk in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan, nearly biffing it chin-first into the side door of a limousine van, and-- this is an important element-- the campaign refuses to release the candidate's medical records to the public, yet reporters are accused of owning a pro-Trump bias if they publish a word about any of it. Worse, and more bizarre than almost anything previously imagine, these reporters are labeled sexist.

It's a silly season to make us forget the previous one, and the one before that. As the War Without End reaches the age that it qualifies for a school driver permit, we see the modern empire in a state of astonishing collapse. The destruction of the Twin Towers, as if in a perfect metaphor, wound up doing a number and a half upon our national psyche. It's exceedingly difficult at this point to claim victory over the terrorists. The USA is a nation that owns a proverbial hammer, a hammer that it enjoys using at any time and at any location upon the globe. But it is hard as hell to exact a violent revenge upon a group of successful suicide bombers. So we were forced to go another way with it. At a concentration camp in Cuba, we locked up and tortured hundreds of people that we thought sort of looked like the suicide bombers. The Bush/Cheney Energy Corporation took us into a bloodbath in Iraq under a total fiction. The Bush and Obama administrations both made firm allies of repressive governments like Saudi Arabia's, and apartheid ones like Israel's, whose leaders gave generous contributions to the Clinton Foundation and, together, we executed the invasions of nations whose leaders didn’t think ahead to give contributions to the Clinton Foundation-- Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, and al-Assad’s Syria.

We see the hijackers' ghosts everywhere, suspecting the terrorists are probably right next door. It’s hard for me, personally, to imagine how the United States could have two better neighbors than the ones it has. Canada is like the better version of ourselves that we like to believe we see in the mirror each day, and Mexico, a culturally rich land with a shockingly stable government considering it breathes next door to a country with an insane policy on drugs and an insatiable habit for them. Yet, according to records printed by the Intercept, we spent $1.1 billion on a “virtual fence” of censors along the Mexican border that turned out to be a technological failure. We threw another $230 million at a failed plan to install radiation detectors at our airports. The lost, priceless treasure of our military men and women in immoral Middle Eastern wars is a profanity-- and not to mention, all for naught. The Taliban holds more territory now than at any point since 2001. According to polls, 90% of young people in Iraq consider the United States to be their “enemy.” Retired U.S. General David Petraeus has recently suggested arming our original enemy in the War on Terror, al Qaeda, in a fight against ISIS. And you wonder why many Americans don’t listen when dicks like him proclaim Donald Trump to be a danger. He is one, but the point goes missing. They are men and women of power operating without moral authority in a nation that also does not possess it.

So the Fourth Estate is gone, unless you have strength enough to reach under its giant, rotting corpse and find the still-beating heart of its tiny children that are the Intercept and Anonymous. Most will never do that, and so they're on their own to do the sorting of what's actually true and what's a press release. On August 1st, President Obama announced his latest war, a new bombing campaign against ISIS in Libya-- and the news media didn’t even notice. That was a day Trump was publicly feuding with a Gold Star father. I'm not sure if he won or lost. The pundits are still debating.

posted by CM @ 7:44 PM