As I despair about the state of America today, among the things I focus on is the state of what passes for news. Our entire “news” infrastructure runs on having fresh content. And, in the case of the right wing, on the need to feed the existing propaganda apparatus with whatever narrative will be most “sticky” among their constituents.
And so, with the recent home invasion and attack on an 82-year old man, by a clearly demented right-wing nut job, obviously politically motivated, instead of reporting the facts, they substitute a laughably-implausible fictional narrative that both downplays the political aspect of the attack, and stokes their large base of homophobes. A two-fer. Then report on that.
Because, time after time, we seem to have an incredibly large number of Americans who are oblivious to how carefully crafted these right-wing and/or Russian disinformation false narratives are. Trying to cast this as a random home invasion isn’t sufficiently sticky. So that lie wouldn’t do. Nope. Similarly, just plain vote fraud wouldn’t do, it has to be massive vote fraud carried out by (pick one) a Black woman, or sneaky Asians with their bamboo-fiber false ballots, or maybe Italo-Jewish satellite space lasers, masterminded by the (long-dead) hispano-communist dictator Hugo Chavez. And so on. Once you grasp that this is all about writing the stickiest story you can — no matter how ludicrous — you immediately realize that the same morons who believed in the Democrat-Jewish pedophile ring run out of a DC pizza parlor basement, by Hillary Clinton — those people need something more salacious to catch their attention.
And so, to be an effective actor within the right-wing propaganda machine, you simply need to align yourself with the some deep-seated malice. Then write the craziest thing you can think to provide the deepest stimulation of that malice. And see if it sticks.
And, of course, given that this one was in San Francisco, the obvious choice was to toss in a fictional gay-bar pickup. By an 82-year-old grandfather who has been married to the same woman for more than six decades. Whose wife is a famous public figure, so he is sure to be recognized in public.
Because that makes so much sense.
But, in fact, there ain’t all that much happening, on any given day. And reality is typically pretty damn dull. So, collectively, every day, we end up scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people with something — anything — to say. True or false no longer appears to make any difference, as long as whatever is said induces fear, anger, hatred, or, ideally, all three. All that, because the money that drives the system depends on viewership, and to succeed you must feed the addiction of the large segment of the population that has become habituated to their daily dose of news-driven endorphins.
If it screeds, it leads.
This is all by way of saying that I am so tired of the term “triple-demic”. Tired of reading this or that talking head telling us that the U.S. may be heading into an unprecedented epidemics of flu, RSV, and COVID.
Why? Why drag COVID into that? Is it just because triple-demic sounds so cute? Or is it not enough merely to state that this is shaping up to be an exceptionally bad flu season. And it looks like serious RSV infections in kids are above average. I guess, because we’re insufficiently afraid of flu? And most people haven’t heard of RSV before, and can’t pronounce respiratory syncytial virus?
So we have to drag COVID into it, for dramatic effect. I guess. Because, as with the Pelosi story, there’s zero factual basis for doing so, at the moment.
Anyway, near as I can tell, the U.S. remains at about 12 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. Same as it’s been for about the past month.
And near as I can tell, there is zero evidence — anywhere — to support the idea that we’re going to have a big wintertime wave of COVID in the U.S. U.S. COVID hospitalizations have fallen to their lowest level since May 2022. And there’s no evidence of a winter wave in Canada. And Europe still appears to be well past the peak of its small winter wave.
But those are facts. And facts are often dull. So triple-demic it is.
The quote, by the way, is best attributed to Mencken.
It’s not even worth updating the usual graphs.
