That's funny; I logged on to SI intending to post that very article. It's nice to see that the military professionals have more intelligence and common sense than the civilian managers. I suspect that this is the case because they are looking at the situation from a practical, rather than an ideological perspective. I have long believed that ideology and intelligence - intelligence in either sense - are fundamentally incompatible.
An odd event recently made me think of you. I was getting a haircut, something I do as seldom as I can manage (I have little enough hair that this is seldom indeed). In the barber shop there was a TV. I could not look at it, since out of deference to the barber I was pretty much committed to looking forward. I had little choice, though, but to listen. There was an interview going on. The interviewee was an author who had written books on crime, and I believe on the OJ Simpson case in particular. The subject of the interview was a recent case in which an actor is accused of killing his wife. The tone of the interview was beyond bizarre: it reminded me of a halftime interview at a sporting event. The interviewer was asking questions that I can only call criminally stupid in the most serious possible tone, and of course the interviewee was treating them with utmost seriousness. The question that stuck in my mind was "if a movie were to be made of this case, what actors would you choose to play the lead roles". The others were along the same lines.
After the interview mercifully concluded, a number of short pieces followed. All treated basically banal material in the same breathless, urgent, tone. All were stupid beyond belief. I didn't notice any particular ideological bias, just stupidity. Everything about the show's content and delivery was just plain dumb. It was like the National Enquirer on TV.
Finally the station identified itself, and it was Fox News. I remembered that you had mentioned watching this channel, which was hard for me to believe: I couldn't imagine you (or any other thinking person) sitting voluntarily through that drivel for more than a few seconds. Did I just catch them on a bad day? Is it all like that?
Do people actually watch that stuff?
I don't watch TV at all, except for an occasional movie or sporting event, so it always seems weird to me, but this was way weirder than anything else I've seen.... |
