Fox Knocks Docs, Mocks Pox
Plies Lies, Cults Cult
Clever title, isn’t it? In addition to adding a little “variety” to this essay (and employing some poetic license to stretch the definition of a virus), if you are reading this, it might be because we live in a highly competitive “attention economy”, and this headline managed to get your attention.
It has been a decade since a critical mass of attention merchants entertained the absurd notion that our 44th president was not an American citizen, and in so doing, they gave it just enough validation to shove us down a slippery slope into what I have referred to in past writings as Problem #1: Of all the major problems we face as a country, none of them can be properly and fully confronted until we address the biggest problem of them all: the reality that the people of our nation no longer share a reality.
What was once an exasperating novelty in the mainstream of stimuli — a blemish of silly absurd lies — has now metastasized into an existential threat to our democracy. There was a time when we could entertain and debate nonsense with little fear of serious consequences, but today the denial of reality has a literal death toll that has reached into the hundreds of thousands. Concurrently, we are now beginning to fully appreciate the reality that democracy cannot function without a common reality
