Awesome article, Kevin. You should read some Martin Kaplan and Neil Postman if you haven’t yet. The arguments you make and the arguments they make are very similar.

Hi, Kevin. I’m one of the folks who posted on your column last week and, well, I didn’t write anything nice. After reading this column, I take everything back. I was a dick, I admit it. With that out of the way, Let’s move on.

The subject of your column this week is what should really be on every American’s mind. Yes, we do worry about things that aren’t worth worrying about. Whether we watch all that drivel for entertainment or just because there’s nothing better on, it all only serves to distract us from the real issue-that our society is going down the tubes.

While our economy teeters on verge of collapse, propped up only by the record spending by Congress and the president, we forget that, down the road, we are the ones who will be paying it off. Another disturbing thought is what we might do if/when we finally hit bottom and the only way to survive is to mug someone or steal something, even if it means taking our neighbor’s life to put food on our own table. Many of us had hoped that Obama’s election in November 2008 would bring a new era of promise. Though he’s been in office for barely a year, many of us are already losing faith. He has continued to allow the big banks to squander federal money, and even though most of the recipients have repaid it, virtually none of it was ever spent to stimulate the economy. We’re holding steady…for now. But how long will it be before it all changes, and will it change for better or for worse? That’s the part that keeps us on edge.

The current academic year is almost half over. Even the business majors who are graduating in June are just as uncertain about their future as they are eager to step up to the podium, grab that sheepskin and get the hell outta here. And then there are the rest of us, long since graduated or never went to college, let alone finished high school. Will it really matter ten years from now what educational background we have if there’s a good chance we’ll end up like a third-world country. Perish the thought, but don’t count on anything getting any better without some heads rolling.

Getting back to Obama-and the folks in Congress, does anyone else besides me wonder if any elected officeholder in Washington really calls the shots anymore? Why does it always seem that the most powerful people in government are bending over for the most powerful people in the private sector? Why can’t they just get a subpoena or a warrant and show up at corporate headquarters. It was very entertaining to watch Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story show up at AIG in a Brink’s truck and money bags, yelling through a bullhorn that the CEOs are under arrest. But wouldn’t it be mind-blowing if actual federal officers showed up instead, with warrants in hand? So why isn’t it happening? What’s stopping our own fearless leaders, the same leaders who sent our troops off to fight terrorists and tyrants, from hauling in the greedy bastards on Wall Street in for questioning?

Our new president, the one pinned our hopes on, has already started to disappoint. There are plenty of things he could be doing right now to turn the tide. Instead, he appears to be doing what unseen hands are directing him to do, while at the same time doing his best to give us the impression that he is on control and that America is on the mend. Sometimes, I wish that, with every second of news coverage of every politician, there would be subtitles appearing onscreen that revealed what was really on their minds. Or if politicians really have souls.

And the most pressing question on my mind these days: How much of this pretense, this canned, off-the-teleprompter BS are we willing to sit back and listen to before we finally decide that we’ve had enough? What will it take for us to finally stop allowing so much division among ourselves and accept the fact that too few of us will ever be the CEO, the president, the talk show host, the movie star or the star athlete that practically all of us hoped to be. Maybe if we were more concerned with improving the quality of life and financial security of even our lowliest citizens, then being just another face in the crowd wouldn’t make us feel so insignificant, so unimportant. We’re all important. That’s why God put us here. Let’s get busy.

There exists a major problem in the basic premise of this argument. You claim the things that took our attention previoulsy were “Iran-Contra, Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill, Whitewater and Monicagate” and then list these trivial celebrity meltdowns as the attention getters of the 2000’s.

This is problematic because you neglect major worldwide scandals that dominated news cycles in the 2000’s. I would say that the major 00’s scandals were the Gore-Bush election, the Bush-adminstrations refocusing the worlds attention to invade Iraq, the mis-handling of the Katrina aftermath, the lack of regulation that allowed credit-default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, etc, and Madoff.

In addition, you were probably just too young to realize that the 90’s media was DOMINATED as well by stupid trivial celebrity bullshit. For example:

• Pamela and Tommy Lee’s sex type
• O.J.’s murder trial
• Lorenna Bobbit cuts off her husbands penis
• Hugh Grant
• Joey Butafucco
• Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding

These were all huge newsmakers.

You are right that this is a problem but is it once that is isolated to the 00’s? Absolutely not. Always fear the argument that things are so much different now than they were in the “good old days,”….this is rarely actually the case.

Collapse the system with Cloward-Piven strategy. Then we can go get our money. http://cloward-piven.com/

Here’s a two-step solution:

1. A federal tax revolt, where we all pay our federal taxes to our state. Corporate and business taxes, personal income taxes, the whole shootin’ match, just pay it to your state.

2. Secession. It won’t have to be forever, just long enough to bring every crooked politician in Washington down on his/her knees. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. When they see that we can keep our wheels turning without them, like we did for the first 140 years of US history, they’ll learn who really calls the shots.

Americans need to be reminded once again that it is they who keep this country strong, not the snake oil salesmen who promise us a cure-all, then blow out of town with our hard-earned money. Time for a second American Revolution. Shall we?

“I truly think we are losing the ability to determine what is and isn�t news.”

The problem is wider than the news. Our culture is increasingly becoming adverse to facts and reason. (News being one category of facts.)

Witness the global warming fiasco. The widespread willingness of the mainstream media, university professors, scientists and most other intellectuals to evade facts they don’t want to hear is truly staggering.

The recent “climategate” emails are only the latest in a trail of fraud, deception and evasion that has been going on for decades at the IPCC and global warming politics in general.

And despite the massive impact this alleged science has on our lives, there has been a concerted effort to ignore, evade and suppress the truth in order to hold on to environmentalist ideology.

The same aversion to facts and reason is true in the health care debate, financial crisis, etc.

You know, you’re right. If it only were the 1980’s, I would never have had the ability to read this “superficial” online article, and could’ve focused on something much more serious and worthwhile, like learning the dance moves to “Beat It.”