Here’s a useful time management tool. With so much to do in crowded lives, it is necessary to weed out pointless distractions. Try this. The more hot air from politicians and heavy breathing from media devoted to any issue, the less chance anything will be done about it, so you can tune it out.
For a month or more there’s been wall-to-wall immigration hysteria. Will the President issue an executive order letting people who are here illegally and have been for years stay here? Or will he deport 12 million of them? Now we know. He will leave things pretty much as they have always been, but will tell 4 million of them they are unlikely to get the heave-ho until Republicans win the presidency.
Republicans are outraged. He is a dictator, an emperor. He has overreached. If they weren’t so beside themselves, they’d pass an immigration law. But they no longer remember how. The House of Representatives increasingly resembles a paralyzed person who won’t be happy until everyone else is equally incapable of action. Hysterical TV pundits and those up for election in 2016 will milk another month or two of outrage from immigration, but nothing will actually happen. You can safely ignore the whole brouhaha.
Parenthetically, it would be interesting to know which tribe of Native-Americans the most virulent foes of immigration — Rush Limbaugh, Tom Tancredo, Louis Gohmert — belong to.
Ferguson, Missouri has been bracing for trouble when the grand jury in the Michael Brown shooting decides to do nothing about it. This of course is only the latest instance of police malpractice leaving minority citizens dead and justice deferred or denied. But media crews are standing by to incite both sides to behave worse than they would if there were no cameras present.Tanks will roll. Molotov cocktails will fly. When the rubble is swept away, there is no chance anything will be done to reduce police shooting of unarmed minority citizens.
Similarly, the latest paranoid schizophrenic with firearms has shot up a school followed by lots of TV coverage as in cases without number including the Gabby Giffords shooting, Aurora, and Newtown. Gun nuts and gun foes, advocates for mental health spending and other learned persons will opine. Nothing will be done to make it harder for the next madmen with weaponry to go on his rampage. But you don’t have to watch.
Less photogenic issues like WMD proliferation and global warming will get a lot less attention, but an equal amount of political action. Zero. Plenty of blather, no debate, compromise, cooperation, legislation. Nothing productive will be done, but each and every issues will be used to cudgel the opposing party with until the next election.
People wonder why the mood of electorate is so vile and why a third or less of eligible voters showed up at the recent midterms. They wonder why we avoid the news and dope ourselves with trivia like Real Housewives and Dancing with the Stars. This is why. Reality bites.
Lagniappe: Apropos TV News as an enabler of dysfunction, I recommend a glittering, dark, and deeply creepy fable of the local TV news business. In “Nightcrawler,” a disturbed and disturbing Jake Gyllenhaal is a small time crook with a patter out of entrepreneurial self-help books who becomes a freelance videographer. He roams the night streets of L.A. to the tune of a police scanner. His goal is to make his fortune by beating the cops and competing camera crews to the scenes of bloody car crashes, shootings, murders and get footage that will increase ratings and scare the bejabbers out of views. He’s a Horatio Alger of pornographic violence. If it bleeds, it leads. Film at 11. A similarly scathing view of the hijinks backstage at MSNBC and Fox News would be a public service.