Where to Go for News
This is not just some continued complaining about lost elections and political disaster. Well, it is about political disaster. And information failure. Though in this disaster, that hasn’t officially begun yet, we are already being soothed with media reports of normalcy (there is a long political history of that rather strange word). Well, of course, Trump is incompetent and often irrational but he is the president elect and we don’t know what else to say so we’ll pretend that things are returning to normalcy. Yeah, he got pissed at the head of Boeing and did a twitter cancellation of a billion dollar contract that he didn’t understand and doesn’t even have anything to do with money until about ten years from now. But, but . . . he is trying to save money. How many got the follow on that this was a nearly total misunderstanding of something that presented itself solely as an opportunity for a burst of hurt feelings.
And yeah, he went along with a setup to call the president of Taiwan, now a nice, smallish democratic country but, unfortunately, still officially the Republic of China, that slapped Beijing in the face. It took several frantic days to get the idea in place that he actually knew what he was doing. Whether or not that made any sense. The whole point being that at the level of the second most powerful country on the planet and one that is growing at least twice as fast as the US and has already surpassed the US in almost all economic measurements it is probably not a good idea to slap them in the face before you are in office. We could also say something about the confusion over who did what and why making this country look like a preschool. And while we are at it, yes, diplomatic relations can be bizarre and very nit picky on protocol and language but this is a way to externalize trust by specifying things that are symbols of that trust. China has not reacted strongly to this because, just my opinion, Trump has made himself into the kid who came rushing in and made a mess because, obviously, he didn’t know any better. China is now being magnanimous with an incompetent. That is not a position of power.
This brings me to the real question about where do we go for news. US media have long been in decline but now have lost all credibility. Trump was created by the media for their benefit and the bill is coming due on January 20. They are now all busy normalizing a Trump “administration” that can never have legitimacy. It is a minority government, not popularly elected, supported by roughly 27% of the eligible voters or less than 20% of the population. They are minimizing racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and misogyny as if their slowly discovered outrage at these things during the later part of the campaign was a mistake that needs to be forgotten. They are reporting petty, peevish tweets with a straight face as if they mean something and, thus, playing along with Trump’s bully game of threatening to threaten people to get his way. Time magazine managed to put horns on Trump and call him the president of the divided states of America as a token gesture. The horns were “inadvertent” and they still called him the president. These are already the tricks of a captive media in an authoritarian state. We will probably see no more of this because soon people will be in prison for these insults.
At this stage I am reading The Guardian, the Economist, and Reuters. I still get the Washington Post daily email but that is, increasingly, simply a Trump mouthpiece stating what wingnut, criminal or sycophant has been given a position of authority in the emerging Trump regime. In the same sense I watch the People’s Daily to know what Beijing is saying. We need new vantage points for the world to see and identify what is really happening as the leadership is passing to Beijing and Berlin. There is an incredible opportunity for media around the planet now that the US has fallen.
My final point here is the end of American exceptionalism. This has been a joke for years with the US famous for racism and military conquest but was able to be maintained based on wealth, media, military power, and the intelligence and style of our president. We are only a few years away from being completely economically surpassed by China, our media is now only a propaganda machine, and our military is suffering from years of endless war and facing a fool as commander in chief. If you monitor the world media at all it is amazing how quickly the mantle of leadership has disappeared from this country. A terrible thing has happened but we are still trying to pretend that it is all the same. But everyone else knows. Obama’s final weeks and international meetings are marking the end of the US and he is being recognized as the last president of the American century.
