Rites Of Passage

When it comes to adolescents many of the “primitive” societies have a much better system than Western “civilization.” There is usually some task set for children at about age 13 that carries a certain level of risk. If the individual successfully completes the task, they are accepted as an adult.

Lacking a traditional structure for this rite, middle school and high school students devise their own systems for determining who should be accepted into the “tribe.” And who should be rejected.

Bullying in one form or another is a feature of the American version of this rite, and it has resulted in major incidents of physical and psychological violence. While the damage to the victims of physical violence is obvious, one of the less visible effects is that some of the victims become media pundits who have never grown up and are still attempting to be accepted as adults.

They form cliques and coalesce around opinions that they approve of and then pass their uninformed guesses off as “conventional wisdom,” to avoid actually having to justify these absurdities with either facts or logic. If they “like” or “admire” someone, in the terms of their world, everyone obviously likes and admires them.

Anyone who disputes their truths, or ignores them is a “bad person,” and therefore must be attacked as a threat to the clique. If they see someone who might give them more power or influence, they will shamelessly “cheerlead” for that person, even though an objective outsider would view that individual as wrong and harmful to the real society.

We all experienced this garbage in middle school and high school, and few if any enjoyed the situation. It is even worse to realize that we are now forced to endure it in politics.

The media pundit clique doesn’t like the Democratic Party as people. Few Democrats are willing to play by the rules of the clique, so few are mentioned by the pundits, and almost none in a favorable manner. While the disaster that the Busheviki have wrought forced the pundits to almost attain the standards of seniors in high school, when the Democratic Party again gained control of Congress, they dropped back to seventh grade.

Much of what the Republicans claim to have accomplished is based on an unrelenting propaganda campaign. The multiple attempts by the Busheviki to control the news and create their own media outlets are based on the belief that they can create their own version of reality by telling people what they should believe. They have progressed beyond “spinning” to actual fabrication of the news, and controlling the op-ed page by making the “opinion leaders” of the media believe they were getting “special access” to the center of power, rather than being shamelessly used as propaganda outlets. The Bushevikis rightly feel that the pundits won’t willingly admit they have been dupes of the Republicans.

The pundits believe that their positions are dependent on their ability to have direct access to the people in power. It doesn’t occur to them that the people in power feel no obligation to tell the truth. No matter how often they have been “burned” by their sources, the pundits keep going back, hoping for the one story that will give them the wildly successful book deal.

If this didn’t cause real damage to the American body politic it would be a bad plot for Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. These people believe themselves to be the “elite” when they are really the intellectual equivalent of “trailer trash”: failed little lives that haven’t progressed, whose one moment of glory “was catching a last second pass in a high school football game.”