Reactive Post Election Blues, 2016

The worldwide migrant crisis stemming from the flow of refugees from the Middle East has a specific cause: the deliberate destabilization of the Middle East by the United States and its NATO allies on Israel’s behalf. It was criminally reckless not to have anticipated such consequence as it is criminally reckless not to assume responsibility for it. The response, both official and popular makes a mockery of the concept of human rights but needs research in order to fully place blame, and much of the blame rests with the mass media.

Rather than reporting news, the mass media has become a vehicle for the mass spewing of propaganda much of its justifying invasion of foreign sovereign states or delegitimization of their governments with follow up coups d’état. Instead of sober analysis with consideration of probable consequences, the mass media closes its metaphorical eyes and ears, holds its metaphorical nose and closes its metaphorical mind. That is unpardonable, both collectively and especially, with reference to the individual members of the mass media that make it so.

The public cheered on the interventions during the past fifteen years (most illegal under international law) based on the propaganda gleefully disseminated by the mass media and the withholding of information pertaining to consequences, not only as to costs in terms of domestic resources and lives to be lost, but as to the consequences of destroying foreign infrastructure. The mass media became the “picador” enraging the bull in the china shop and now seeks to quietly slip out the door, leaving the entire cleanup and replacement costs to the dazed owners (us).

Now that same mass media expresses dismay at the results of elections all over the world, think Brexit, the no vote on peace in Colombia, the victory of Donald Trump in the US election and the surging right wing parties in Europe, shades of the 1920’s come back to life; elections which may be bringing out the worst in us, but which are the direct and easily predictable consequences of the mass media’s dereliction of its most fundamental and important duties. It has just failed to impose a terrible candidate on the American electorate despite having fully implemented a plan to deprive us of any other choice, and is collectively beside itself. And now, accompanying that faux dismay is a continuation of its abuse of the power constitutionally entrusted to it as it casts about for scapegoats to blame, and it is you and I they are portraying as villains.

We humans are reactive and have a great ability to rationalize. We are not, by nature, strategic planners or brilliant tacticians. We are too busy surviving the trials and travails of our daily lives so we entrust those critical tasks to others, purported experts and specialists, extremely highly paid experts and specialists granted immense prestige and privileges. But the enormous benefits they receive (and in too many cases award themselves) generate responsibilities.

What should happen to them when those responsibilities are so horribly betrayed? Our civilized world provides us with only one remedy but as a people we are unlikely to avail ourselves of it. Our collective memories are too short and the mass media’s ability to manipulate us for the benefit of their real masters too efficient. We are too busy living our daily lives and will too soon forget that the mass media is not an entity on which we can rely. And so we will suffer more and more serious consequences and the mass media will publish more and more stories dividing us, wreaking more and more chaos on which it can report.

As the purportedly wicked witch of the East once declaimed in an early film version of the Wizard of Oz as she slowly melted after “inadvertently” having been soaked by a Dorothy seeking to save her “what a world, what a world”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved