We all read the newspapers, or watch TV news broadcasts or hear the frequent radio news reports. Most of us do all three plus go on the internet and get even more news. So we develop a feel for the rhythm of news events and find many things unsurprising. For example, in France right now there's a massive strike. This time it's the railway workers striking over something or other and a lot of other labor unions walking out in sympathy. It's the usual drill in France, a "nationwide strike paralyzing the nation." Yeah, sure. Seems like France pretty much shrugs these things off and shows no sign at all of paralysis after many decades of this same old story. Light up a Gauloise, pop open some Merlot and enjoy another day off. Whether the strike lasts a day or a week, so what? C'est la vie.
There's lots of deja news. You can bank on a couple of entertainers a month making complete jerks of themselves with drugs, drink, sex or automobiles, or as is often the case, all four of those things at once. Three times a year some prominent politician somewhere in this great nation does even worse things than our decadent entertainers, no easy feat. About every eighteen months a rock & roll star dies in a small aircraft. You'd think by now these guitar slingers would swear off Piper Cubs and just die a respectable rock & roll death by drug overdose or cirrhosis of the liver.
In Africa you can always count on one country or another having their two main tribes slaughter each other with machetes and burning tires while United Nations troops count the bodies and recommend forming a committee to study the situation. And you can count on all the major oil producers in the Middle East to continue to run world-class tyrannies while the industrial democracies who buy their oil continue to apologize for their behavior. How many times can we hear "cultural differences" and "conservative religious values" to excuse the house arrest of all their women, public floggings, amputations and decapitations, the complete suppression of free speech, the brutal murder of practitioners of different faiths and the funding of worldwide terrorism before we figure out that these nations are really the enemy and our leaders are sucking up to human monsters?
We could all write this news copy ourselves. How much do you want to bet that some leader somewhere in Europe will very soon condemn the latest round of anti-Semitic synagogue attacks? How soon before Israel flaunts its own anti-Semitism by sending troops against their fellow Semites, some Arab group or another. And how many guys who don't live there will come up with another sure fire peace plan for the Middle East? And is any news cycle complete without the news of China building another dam or a chemical factory in a place where there's an earthquake every fortnight?
Does two months go by without some semi-literate TV preacher from the Heartland of America making news by saying that some horrible disaster or other is God's wrath on America because A.- There are gay people in America, B.- There's not enough of their brand of Fascist Christianity being practiced, or C.- We are not doing enough to wipe out Muslims? And how about another giant American corporation announcing that it is moving its operations overseas because American workers make too much money and then paying their CEO sixty million dollars a year for coming up with this brilliant deduction? We could write this stuff ourselves at this point. Wake me up when something new and different happens, like peace, understanding, fair play and brotherhood breaking out somewhere.
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