Screening room

I spent much of yesterday afternoon in a hospital waiting room with CNN blaring on the small screen and after reading everything from half a dozen elderly Field and Stream issues to the current Working Mother Magazine, I had to give up on the printed word and pay attention to the blather. I rarely watch CNN any more and if you wonder why, it's because in three hours, all I heard from them other than advertising, was about "John McCain's vision for the future" and the terribly, terribly important overturn of a gay marriage ban in California again and again like some fast paced version of Groundhog Day.

"Many people are concerned that we need more conservatives in government so that we won't have judges who decide this way" was nearly the entirety of the commentary, the balance was the observation that it was the Constitution (hence not the judges) that stood in the way of preserving the "sanctity" of marriage. Regardless of the now apparently reduced sanctity of my own marriage, I continued to wait for my dear wife to have her X-ray with undiminished dedication.

Sanctity, of course is indeed a subject that our Federal Constitution excludes from the business of government. Establishing religious rules or laws based on religious rules is specifically forbidden and not applying any laws in a discriminatory fashion, whether based on religious taboos or not, has long been established in the law. What does CNN mean to imply here: that we should get rid of that nasty secular Democracy thing so we can all be holy? What else can we infer?

And then there was John McCain's vision for the future. It seems rather blurry even for his 71 year old eyes, but then any serious predictions of a brave, new Republican World had better be blurry lest it appear too much like the cowardly old Republican World we've been suffering through at length. The "war" will be "won," sayeth John, quoting from the Gospel of Nixon. Of course he's right, since the war was won 5 years ago. What continues is the occupation of a hostile country and occupations are never won but maintained only at tremendous and usually increasing cost.

None of this seems to have left a trace, at least on CNN or CNN.com. Perhaps it's because of some fleeting sense of embarrassment or perhaps there are so many new inanities and so little time, but my sense of despair remains. No story hits the street save through such sources and no story is told without the Greek Chorus of hysterical idiots making it into something to stir the primitives to frenzy.

Maybe the public isn't as stupid as they appear. Perhaps the West Virginians John Stuart featured Wednesday night who told us they wouldn't vote for Obama because "we've had so much conflict with the Other Race" or "I've had enough of Hooooo-sayn" or "He's a Moslim" don't represent the rest of us, but the fate of old optimists like me is to become an old pessimist like me.