Why the media is driving you crazy (with all the Tom Cruise and Tommy Chong you can eat, but only in Wisconsin)

“You rang?” – The Addams Family

You can see Hollywood® height in action here.  In reality, Tom Cruise is only four inches (like 10 centimeters) tall!  He’s a pocket celebrity!

One criticism I have of the media is that it sets an expectation of the way the world should be.  The media does this in a silly way:  single girls in New York City own 3,000 square foot apartments and work as flunkies at the local ad agency as the wacky receptionist.  The media indicates that Tom Cruise is 6’2” (37 meters) tall, even though we have pictures to prove that Tom Cruise fits as carry-on luggage in a 737.

So, Tom Cruise is shorter than the average height of a 3^rd grade girls’ basketball team.  Doesn’t matter, they haven’t carded him since 2015!

The biggest bias, however is that of the news writers, Internet publishers and national broadcasters.  Every piece of news is advocacy.  How can I justify this bold statement?  Besides the incredible mixture of Pinot Noir and steroids flowing through my veins, only awaiting the caffeine as the activator chemical, I offer this bit of evidence:

When The Mrs. was involved in news broadcasting, she selected the stories that would be covered in the broadcast.  And, since The Mrs. didn’t like the NBA®, NBA™ news never made it to the broadcast.  Never.  Michael Jordan might have had LeBron James’ love child in a Swiss robot factory with Larry Bird as the godfather and she wouldn’t have broadcast it.  Instead?  The Mrs. inserted stories about a sport she did like, NHL™ hockey, even though there wasn’t a professional hockey team within a ten hour drive from where the broadcasts originated, and ice had to be imported from Utah, which, strangely forbade that the ice be properly mixed with bourbon.

Even though the stories themselves were without bias, the selection of the stories wasn’t.  Although the topic The Mrs. didn’t wish to cover was (and is) exceedingly trivial, it sank home with me:  the gatekeepers choose the stories and the narratives.  The gatekeepers do so with the express purpose of furthering their viewpoint and silencing dissenting evidence.  And even though much of the news today has a significant bias in straight news reporting, it’s the stories that you never hear that also contribute to that bias.

How bad is the bias?  Only 7% of journalists are Republican.  You can simply view election night footage from the 2016 presidential election to verify that.  And, I think much of the street-level misbehavior in recent days has been a reaction to the increasingly polarized news.  Much of the news media we used to consume in the past was locally sourced and sustainable and gluten-free.  It was the town newspaper, which could be had in most small towns and was run by the local boy who decided that ink was in his veins and he wanted to put a daily out to the locals.  Heck, even a hamlet of 1100 people had a newspaper that had an 80 year history in my memory.  It was a small paper, but everyone got it.

The values that the local newspaper editor/publisher/journalist/typesetter put in the paper mirrored the local values for over 200 years.  These values were always tempered and supplemented with news from outside the small town – the town didn’t exist in a vacuum.

Now many of those papers have vanished, and others have long since stopped being the local source for in-depth news.  You read the local paper to figure out who won the softball game, and which kid was on (or not on) the honor roll.

What’s replaced it?  Television and news via the internet.

Where does television come from?  New York and Los Angeles are the two big metropolitan areas that are the headquarters for the major broadcasters.  And the internet?  It’s got San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle as the hubs for the major news operations.  None of the major locations that now serve the majority of news to Americans is on the right – each of these cities is exceptionally far left.  I know it doesn’t seem that way to those of you that live there, but, good heavens, those governments have more regulations than the old Soviet Union (even though I just made that fact up, I’m pretty sure it’s true – I heard that Stalin® was arrested in Seattle for trying to open a lemonade stand – too capitalist.  Plus Stalin™ couldn’t prove the lemons were free range, vegan, locally sourced, and carbon neutral.  He claimed Lenin© ate that paperwork.  Stupid Lenin®.

And thus, when Donald Trump was elected president, through the process as outlined in the Constitution and followed since George Washington was drinking brandy by the fire at Mt. Vernon with the Hooters® girls, calls immediately came to “restore our democracy.”  People took to the streets to protest a president before he had been inaugurated – and immediate calls for his impeachment went out.

Why?

The left had been living in a lie, sort of like the mirror the Kardashians® keep on their wall.  In this world, Donald Trump is a monster – all of their media, all of their news told them so (just like they said the same things about George W. Bush™, who is now totes okay).  Trump was not a political opponent with a set of positions that were backed by millions and millions of decent, smart, hardworking Americans.  No.  He was an evil villain who wants to eat children and send them to his hellish pits under the Earth to mine for Trumpenite, a substance known to cause really unusual hair.  However, per my last count, he has eaten no children, nor put any into concentration camps (despite what the media might say, and they told me the Arctic would be ice free by 2014, so, you know, my trust level is low).

But no one who reads this will be able to do a thing about it until November, 2020.

The media frenzy against all things Trump, the bias, has whipped millions of normally sane people into a rabid frenzy to the point that they defend Haiti as a great place to send their toddlers out to play in the streets, point out that MS-13 murderers are probably great neighbors as long as they don’t move to the suburbs, and come to the conclusion that Kim Jong-Un either is awesome or such an evil genius that he blew up his own nuclear facility just to prove that he didn’t need nuclear weapons to have nuclear weapons.  Or something.

And this is the point of this blog – the inability to deal with reality is just . . . unhealthy.

Take a deep breath, if you’re on the left.  Step back.  Trump has done something you like.   Admit it.  It’s out there.

It’s also a paradox – standards and expectations are necessary for excellence in anything.  There must be a burning desire to turn “what is” into “what could be.”  But when that same desire is thwarted because no reasonable action will make any difference, the matter is beyond your control.  This leads to the profound sense of helpless misery that many on the left are feeling about the election (that happened in 2016!) – and that many on the right are feeling about, say, Robert Mueller®, who starred in the 1960’s comedy series The Addams Family as Lurch©, the butler.

Is it just me, but shouldn’t he say this every single time he testifies at Congress?

And not one person who reads this can do anything about Mueller, either.

And not one person who this who is in a frenzy about either Trump or Mueller is at all healthy.

I’ve written about this before in The Coming Civil War (United States), Cool Maps, and Uncomfortable Truths and I think it’s tearing us apart even faster than I had originally thought.  I try not to take sides, but the left has really inflamed this situation to a point of incivility worse than any episode I’ve ever seen of The Big Bang Theory (spoiler, I only saw one, and it was awful).

All of this brings me back to The Mrs.:  If I come home and have the expectation that she’s arranged my PEZ® dispensers into the outline of the Danish coastline like I asked her to do, and find out she hasn’t, I have four choices:

• Get as angry as a liberal restaurant owner at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or
• Appoint a special counsel to investigate her, or
• Riot in the streets that Denmark is really a part of Germany, and should be open to all Germans, or
• Don’t care and do it myself.

I assure you that I’m a last bullet point kind of guy.  Earlier in my life, I might have had higher expectations, but then I realized – if The Mrs. has a hot meal ready for me when I get home, I should be grateful.  I should say thanks.  If she doesn’t, I know where the fridge is, and there’s probably a good reason we don’t have dinner ready.  Or not.  If I let myself get as twisted as Bill Clinton’s lingerie collection, well, I’ll be unhappy AND hungry AND have thong marks on my butt until they bury me in 40 years or so.

So, I don’t have that expectation.  I have the expectations that The Mrs. is faithful, holds our family relationship as at least her number two priority in life (there has to be room for a higher entity, and I don’t mean Tommy Chong), and that The Mrs. flushes the toilet so I can pretend The Mrs. doesn’t poop.  The Mrs. meets those criteria, so everything else is groovy.

I loved these Cheech and Chong when I was a kid.  As I understand it Tommy Chong’s toenail clippings are considered a controlled substance in every state except Wisconsin.

One amazingly significant source of frustrations for people is looking and the world, and seeing it as . . . wrong.  If there’s a solution or something you can do to change it, then work to change it.  If there’s nothing you can do to change it, it just is a fact.  So, relax.  Breathe deep.  You can make it.  And remember to vote on the first Wednesday in November of 2020!

THIS IS NOT POLITICAL, HEALTH, OR VOTING INFORMATION.  Seriously.  How could you think that?