The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This morning in the mainstream lying press, I read about a UW professor who was tracking blogsites and twitter feeds to see if she could get a handle on where folks are getting their information these days. InfoWars. She was astounded that most people are reading – and probably believing— the alt-right and far left sites that appeal to their biases, not their reason. I listened this morning on the radio to an interview with a right wing talk show host who accused his interviewer and NPR of bashing all things Trump, just another example of the lying media.

Trump and his mentor Bannon of Breitbart have studiously planted the seeds of public doubt about the veracity of the Washington Post and New York Times. We are entering a techno-fueled Dark Age. I talked with a woman last week who said she couldn’t bear to read anything but the sites that bashed Trump. The entire nation seems to be pulling the covers over our heads and listening only to voices that agree with us. This tribalism bodes ill for Reason.

If I can summarize, the way to determine if something is faux news or factual news is this: it’s all phony. Everyone is lying. Truth is relative. Truth is what I believe, period. Walter Cronkite was a big fat liar, we just didn’t know it yet. Rush Limbaugh is God and he’s laughing at us. He killed the truth by telling people what they wanted to hear.

I don’t have the optimism I once had about the fate of a nation that loves its own ignorance. Like my old neighbor loved to intone: no brains, no headaches. Course, he went bankrupt three times, lost his wife and kids and his farm. My bet is he didn’t learn a single lesson from that. It isn’t that we no longer learn from history, we don’t even believe in history.

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