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Page added on December 7, 2015
Kunstler: Shining a Light
The just-released movie Spotlight is about a Boston Globe investigative reporting team circa 2001-02 that uncovered and documented a vast network of child sex abuse by priests in the Catholic Church that had been on-going for decades. More to the point, Spotlight revealed the institutional rot at the very top of the Boston Catholic Church hierarchy, led by then-Cardinal Bernard Law — which marinated church personnel in a code of secret atrocious behavior enabled by systematic lying and deception. In effect, the church gave permission to its foot-soldiers, the parish priests, to engage in whatever sexual antics they wished to, with a tacit promise to shield them from the reach of the courts. The civil authorities of Boston, heavily Catholic due to Boston’s demographics, assisted the church by throwing up every legal obstacle they could to deter the victims and their advocates in the search for justice — and to put an end to the predation of children by priests.
That was the story that Spotlight told, and it did that very economically, without grandstanding. But the movie had another message for me, as someone who has been involved in the media going back more than forty years when I was an investigative newspaper reporter myself. The message was that the institutional support for great journalism that allowed the Globe’s Spotlight reporting team to do its job is now gone-baby-gone. All the newspapers in the USA, and even the TV and radio news networks, are running these days on skeleton crews. At least that is true of the old flagship organizations such as the Boston Globe and CNN. They just don’t have the reporters out in the field. The front-page or flatscreen interface that the public sees conceals ghost organizations that barely have the reporting resources and the reach to discover what is actually going on in the world.
The dying newspapers — and they really are on life-support at this point, including the Globe and The New York Times — can’t pay teams of reporters like the Spotlight crew to work through years-long investigations. But what the movie also ought to remind us is that the hierarchical competence at such an enterprise, the layers of editors who know what they are doing and understand the boundaries and conventions of their own society, is also disastrously AWOL in the new Wowee-Zowie era of instant cell-phone networking, Facebook, and Instagram. In a word, leadership has been made to seem dispensable.
What gets left out of the story, as usual, are the diminishing returns of technology. In the news business — that is, the business of informing society what is actually going on — that blowback is leaving the public not just uninformed or misinformed, but additionally clueless about what they have lost. The result is a society increasingly shaped by delusion and paralysis. For example, The New York Times has gone from being the “newspaper of record” to being the leading dispenser of wishful thinking by a feminized political Left preoccupied with feelings over truth. (This, by the way, helps to account for the remnant media’s hatred of Vladimir Putin, a leader who doesn’t apologize for acting one like one. And, of course, a man.) The Old Gray Lady is also reduced to overt cheerleading for its avatar (Monday’s lead op-ed: HILLARY CLINTON — How I’d Rein In Wall Street Ha!), and making excuses for our grift-and rackets-based polity (Paul Krugman: The Not-So-Bad Economy Ha Ha Ha!).
At the local level, the news situation is simply pathetic. The surviving local newspapers are little more than bulletin boards for news releases from interested parties. They’ve fired all their reporters. Soon the papers will all be gone and the vaunted wondrous Internet will be little more than a grapevine and a rumor mill. The “cloud” that everybody thinks is so marvelous will look more and more like an epochal fog — and we’ll lost in it. These are the wages of our techno-narcissism, a society now marinating in cluelessness the way the Catholic church, as depicted in Spotlight, marinates in pederasty and deceit. It is frankly hard to see a way out of the cultural predicament. Two things, at least, are necessary to break out of this hall of mirrors: men acting like honorable men, and hierarchies of leadership with the integrity to actually lead. For now, the USA is not interested in those things.
6 Comments on "Kunstler: Shining a Light"
Plantagenet on Mon, 7th Dec 2015 11:41 am
A fish rots from the head.
theedrich on Mon, 7th Dec 2015 12:56 pm
But Catholicism’s sacerdotal pederasty did teach the media how to cover up. Consider how the latter concealed just one small tidbit about the current POTUS:
Barry was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, which means he must have been conceived in early December (or perhaps in late November) of 1960, when his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (born 1942 November 29), just after (or possibly before) her 18th birthday, was inseminated by American Negro Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a Communist Party USA propagandist in Chicago and Hawaii, as well as a writer and poet. (This fact is congruent with a widely disseminated picture of the young Stanley Ann posing naked in a room with Christmas decorations.) In order to avoid the opprobrium of having lost her virginity to an American Negro, she found an African one, Obama of Kenya, and copulated with him while pregnant, then blamed the fetus on him. In pursuing her later career (much more important to her than motherhood), she essentially abandoned her son to her own mother, Barry’s grandmother, a bank president who was also demonically leftist. (Such bizarre orientations are by no means unknown among the wealthy.) This twisted background is the reason why the resultingly psychopathic White House Negro has sealed all records about his birth. And why, a few years ago, he even put an utterly falsified picture of a “long form” of his supposed birth certificate on the internet. (Anyone with a copy of Photoshop could strip out the layers of the PDF file and see that it had been faked.)
The “impact news” knew all about this at the time, but somehow just couldn’t bring itself to reveal the truth. So it is clear that Christianity is not alone in its pretense to be an untouchable oracle of veracity. The media (and we know who runs it) has long outpaced it in mendacity, which is why nowadays it is losing out to the internet, which has even more entertainment value.
But the Old Gray Crone and her imitators will continue spouting their propaganda for those who love to be deluded. Which happens to be the majority of the American electorate.
efarmer on Mon, 7th Dec 2015 4:55 pm
I found out that my mother was naked often before and after I was born, but nobody got any pictures, so while it vexes me it doesn’t get brought up much on the web and I can live wit it.
Of course I have never been nude,
well almost never,
well not ever totally,
well maybe a couple of times.
A Bank President who is demonically Leftist is scary as hell as well,did his checks have a hammer and sickle instead of a dollar sign?
How does a Leftist get rich honorably?
makati1 on Mon, 7th Dec 2015 7:43 pm
A very accurate and succinct* description of our current sock puppet. theedrich. “News” is dead in the US.
*For the uneducated here: Succinct: “…marked by compact precise expression without wasted words <a succinct description."
(Merriam-Webster)
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Mon, 7th Dec 2015 11:30 pm
I lost my virginity to an American negro but it wasn’t my fault. He told me he was an African negro, but then I found out he was from Chicago. We met in the shabby end of Cyprus in 1976. I was from Miami. He told me he was from Zambia. Luckily he did not impregnate me with his seed or I too would have had to find a REAL African negro and dupe him into believing he was the father of my child. The alternative would have been to suffer the opprobrium of losing my virginity to an American negro and not an African negro. Lol fucking retard!
efarmer on Tue, 8th Dec 2015 8:42 am
I went down to the Crossroads, with my guitar to see if I had the licks to be a bluesman. An American Negro showed up and said his name was Frank and that he was from Chicago but living in Hawaii. He whipped out a ukelelee and used a bottle neck as a slide. His hot licks immediately kicked my ass, I busted the neck off my guitar and burnt it in a barrel to stay warm, dude was so cool I nearly froze to death. When the fire went out, my teeth started chattering, and the dude came over with his uke and did a syncopated blues using my chattering teeth as a Latino castanet sort of Carmen Miranda and Lightning Hopkins jam session. I hocked my Grandfather’s Timex pocket watch to buy Moon Pies to eat and hitched a ride home on a watermelon truck. This is real life, not the pablum you read in the Old Gray Crone or have funneled into your pointy head from the impact news.