5 A.M. News

The other day my girlfriend told me that she really enjoys sharing a bottle of whisky with me on Thursdays. A bit of strange statement, given that half these nights end up with her sobbing as I yell at broken furniture, but I’m not one to judge. I’ve always lived with the philosophy that an interesting life is better than a happy one, and that tragedy is the highest form of art. After all, you have to admit that hiding in the corner as your boyfriend breaks his knuckles on an oaken coffee table is more interesting that playing Solitaire for six hours straight.

The only problem is that sometimes other people get sucked into our world, with no warning of what’s going to happen. A few weeks back we’d been going hard, only to run out of liquor sometime around four in the morning. My girlfriend said she had a bottle of Rum squirreled away at home, so we mounted up and went over there, expecting to continue our vicious conversation unabated. Now here’s the thing – she’s been living with her folks while she completes her degree, but this shouldn’t have been an issue that night; they’d flown down to Utah the day before, and we should have had the house to ourselves.

Only they forgot to tell her that they’d rebooked for the morning. We found this out an hour later when her mother came downstairs to watch the morning news.

It’s been several years since I’ve watched anything on television, and even longer since I’ve picked up a newspaper. If she’d been watching one of those idiotic Breakfast-Morning programs – you know, the ones that dictate what percentage of Halloween candy your kids should be allowed to eat every night – then nothing would have happened, in all likelihood. The hosts of those programs are specifically chosen mutations, born with extra teeth, who hiss out an obsequious white-noise sort of dialogue to numb you as you prepare for another day on this awful planet. That’s not my cup of tea, but hating them is like hating the latest Friday night sitcom lineup; they’re not supposed to be good.

If she’d been watching one of those then I might have been able to stay civil, but instead she turned on the 24 Hour news channel, the one that cycles every five minutes and delivers nothing but soundbites and pap. First they reported on Balloon Boy; next there was something about a shark attack in the Florida keys; after that they started talking about some guy whose spare-tire exploded on the highway. This alone would have been enough for my horns to appear, but while this nonsense was being reported the ticker at the bottom of the screen listed suicide bombings in Pakistan, a proposed extension of the Patriot Act, and the sniper attack by domestic terrorists. I could hold it no longer, and exploded into a whisky fuelled rant against the television while my girlfriend looked on in horror.

But what was I supposed to do? Hell, I was holding back. You see, blaming the media for their lack of reporting is idiotic; they’re in the business of making money, giving the public what it wants. The only one to blame was the woman who’d turned it on, who’d chosen this nonsense news over anything of substance, and for my girlfriend’s sake I never pointed that out.

With every year that passes things are growing more partisan. On the left they’re all laughing at the Tea Party because of one jackass that thinks socialised medicine is comparable to the holocaust; on the right they think that global warming is a religion and that Obama was born in Kenya. Whether it’s CNN or Fox, they’ve learned to conform to the prejudices of their viewers (the party line, and nothing but the party line!) reporting the facts that support their biases, and ridiculing anybody who disagrees – no matter how many times Peter Schiff is proven right. Civil discussion is gone, having slowly devolved into the jackass brayings of quoted sound-bites, spoken in vernaculars which are fast-coming to resemble Orwell’s NewSpeak – President Obama is a Communist? No, he is the Chosen One!

Freedom of Speech is more than a fundamental right, it’s a goddamned moral principle – “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”* It’s not enough to just allow somebody else to speak, you need to actually listen to them; any time you tune into some biased, misreporting channel; the one that stimulates the part of you between your genitals and your anus, you’re throwing away the very things that make you human. At that point you might as well drop the pretention of being a civilized member of an advanced society, and just tattoo a logo on your head. You don’t watch the news so that you can be informed, you watch the news so that you can act as if you’re informed.

Attending your daily Minute of Hate because your life is meaningless is one thing; pretending that it gives you an educated opinion on the war with Eurasia is another.

Oh, and as for why my girlfriend puts up with me starting arguments with her parents at five in the morning? Because as awful as I am, at least I’m not one of you.

*Interestingly enough, not a quote from Voltaire

Thanks go out to Doctor Rob and PhilaLawyer for inspiring this post