I know, not quite what you’d expect for the holidays…but bear with me. I have come face to face with an inordinate dump of personal bullshit this year; an unwinnable confrontation with an insurance agency, an equally fruitless scuffle with the accounting department of a major music company, which shall remain, (WB), nameless, and coming to grips with the reality, that the thousands of albums and songs for which I am a royalty participant, (my legacy?), have been hi-jacked by the likes of Spotify, which has, without negotiation, determined the artist’s share of revenue to be in the neighborhood of 1/1000thof its pre-streaming value. I won’t pretend that these, along with the much, much longer list, don’t send me into the bi-polar manic stratosphere or that I haven’t overly and overtly bent the ears of too many friends who’ve politely listened to my complaints, but my personal plight(s) is a mere, cosmic eye-twitch on the woeful state of the expectations of truth and fairness in the InterNet Age.
This is where you’d expect that I would go right after Fox News and the President and any number of bat-shit crazy Republicans…that will be fodder for paragraph four. Bullshit, as it turns out is both universal and bi-partisan. Take CNN, for instance…please! Anybody remember the promise at the birth of cable TV? I’ll refresh your memory…a hundred channels, consistent picture quality, NO commercials, affordable monthly service charge…did I mention NO commercials? What did we get? A bazillion channels, HD picture, a bazillion commercials and a convoluted laundry list of service charges impossible to parse even with the help of the friendly, though unintelligible, sales rep from Mumbai. Although CNN has the occasional snippet of current event reportage, each three-minute programming segment is prefaced by a “BREAKING NEWS” teaser, the actual content of which is often postponed two or three segments down the road, hoping to keep viewers intrigued through the endless hawking of drugs, reverse mortgages, one-day dental implants and back pain miracle treatments. Bullshit!
In the past 25 years, most of the known world has been digitally sucked into the inescapable gravity of the InterNet. We bank, shop, study, search, communicate and get off in a blurred atmosphere that very few of us understand in any reasonable way. In countries, like ours, that have virtually unfiltered access, we bumble about, flexing our surfing muscles with an unfounded hubris that we have some innate sense of what we’re doing while every search, click and scroll is, in fact, exposing us to schooled manipulators with all manner of dastardly intent…electing Trump President, for instance. That, in itself, would certainly be scary enough, but the real damage, the genii that will not be returning to its lamp, is the blatant and inadvertent abandonment of factual information. Britannica, the lauded scholarly tome has lost out to Wikipedia, a user-edited mélange of whateverthefuckanybodywantstoputinit. Cyber Bullshit!
Here’s the paragraph where I start screaming like a maniac. In the early days of Roger Ailes’ Fox News, there was an attempt at subtle, persuasive rhetoric deeply steeped in an ultra-conservative mantle. As viewership rose and commercial revenues increased the Goebbles’, I mean Ailes’ propaganda machine felt emboldened to begin peppering already biased reporting with supportive corroboration that was knowingly false, a tactic that has further increased its popularity. Today, it doesn’t even attempt to hide that it has become the source for All the Bullshit that’s fit to Bullshit! Oh, and the bullshit Republicans…Mitch Bullshit McConnell, Paul Bullshit Ryan, Lindsey Dumb-Fuckin-Bullshit Graham, (I mentioned I’d be screaming, right?), non-stop, decency-ending, democracy-killing Bullshit!