Fake News on my Street

My neighbor Bob likes to keep me up to date with all the celebrity deaths. I usually tell him that they faked their deaths and retired to "Gay Island". Bob laughs, but he implicitly and seriously believes everything that comes out of the TV labeled "News".

You see, my neighbor Bob is autistic. He is 56 and lives with his mom. All he talks about is movies, 80's music and what he and his mom are going to eat. He is foul mouthed and racist and he can repeat back to you whatever he has been told. We worry about what will happen to Bob after his mom passes. He will probably get robbed blind, and even then it probably won't affect his lifestyle much.

In many ways my dimwitted neighbor is a kind of caricature of "Merica". When I hear him talking about a news story, I'm sure I will hear about it from my friends and loved ones with the exact same sentiment and understanding. When I hear him review a movie, I know his rating will accurately reflect the stats on IMDB. He drives a car just like we do, he buys his food in the grocery store just like we do. Just like the rest of us, he sits around watching TV and movies. Bob gets the news from TV talking heads and by talking to people who pass by his house. He is always eager to swap news stories with fellow news junkies.

But parroting the news is not a sign of intelligence. In fact, it's a kind of autism. Bob is a baby bird, reflexively swallowing media lies and then regurgitating them on command. Bob and his mom stand in line to be fed visual junk food, gulp it down with gusto and then deliver their reviews to me. If it had sex, swear words and rock-n-roll then it was a "great" movie, according to Bob. The critics might pan the movie, but tits, cussing and guitars will please Bob and the rest of the IMDB fan base, making it a huge financial success. We are baby birds like Bob, slurping crap and loving it.

I wonder if we even deserve to discover the truth. We haven't earned it. We won't believe it. We aren't prepared to do anything about it. We would be helpless without the Mighty Wurlitzer dropping nonsense into our gaping, empty maws. Perhaps we deserve what we have: an endless stream of entertainment, some items purporting to be news, some happy, some frightening. We react as we have been programmed to react. We dump buckets of frozen water onto our heads when instructed. We avoid crowded places when Ebola threatens. We joyfully submit to full body scans because of Shoe Bombs.

Bob wants his daily dose of media lies. He doesn't want to doubt the reports, he wants to memorize them and repeat them. My friends and loved ones are certainly intelligent enough to research a story and find out enough to make them doubt the mainstream narrative. We all have the tools. We all are capable of learning the techniques. But we don't want to. We want to be fed. We don't want to feed ourselves.

Perhaps this is just another aspect of specialization. I can grow my own beans, dry them, cook them, refry them, but I prefer to get it from a can on a supermarket shelf. Why then should I re-research the news? Why should I doubt what they say? Would it make any difference? If I uncovered a vast conspiracy, what then? It just creates problems for everybody. Why not simply digest the stories as best I can, and treat life as a realistic story with some improbable plot twists? Why seek out one undistorted truth in an endless funhouse of lies?

Perhaps what I have is a sickness. Perhaps I have an unrealistic expectation of facts in a Rashomon world of subjective points of view. The conspiracies are enormous, the actors are brazen and have no fear of discovery. The agents are busy and successful and seem to live full lives. I find myself in a topsy turvy world where lies are defended and the truth covered up with impunity.

Maybe Bob is the New Normal. Maybe I'm just having trouble transitioning to the New Normal. I have certainly lost my taste for digging out the truth. But I have seen the lies, and now I can see through them, and I can't go back. I can't go back to believing 2+2=5. I can't unsee what I have seen. I simply distrust the media now, and I will never trust it again. So I have lost something, a trust in the mass media that Bob retains. It's a loss of innocence, and I can't be happy about that.

But we don't believe in Santa Claus even though the belief might make us kinder and gentler. We don't believe in Santa Claus because he doesn't exist. That belief is not something we try and hang on to. We let it go because we are more interested in what is true than in what lies might make us kinder and gentler. I have abandoned the lies spread by talking heads, and I don't miss them. I don't want to go back to those happy days when I believed terrorists roamed the world. Frankly speaking, I don't want to be like Bob.

So Bob reflexively believes the news, I reflexively doubt the news. Is either one preferred? Should I spend all day researching every Fake News story until I unravel it? I could never keep up! What is the end game for researchers? Even if we exposed every lie, do you think Bob is going to change his mentality? He will still want to be fed the news; he would simply look for a different source. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I don't want to be negative, but where is this all going? No one really seems to care if the mass media is all lies. We need some common frame of reference, and TV news is it. If we didn't have TV news we would be talking about the Walking Dead or Game of Thrones or Star Wars. Fake News seems to have become more of a talking point than a serious reflection of reality, although many people do sometimes ponder, in a superficial and abstracted way, how a particular story is incredible or unlikely.

If the truth is not important to Bob, then why should I force him to face it? He is far more interested in the act of talking than the content of his speech. Learning the truth would only alarm him, assuming he is capable of digesting the ramifications - something not at all likely. He is quite content as he is. If a cop tells him to duck and cover because a terrorist is on his street, Bob and his mom would be under the table until he got the all-clear; and he would be grateful to the cop for the warning. Bob would be eager to share his adventure and not at all interested in the truth of the matter.

To sum up, I think this whole truth business has a very limited appeal. I think that the people it is most likely to impress are the very people who have been co-opted: the "intelligentsia" who live in cities and write the scripts. The rest of us are forced to either go with the flow or try and swim against the current. The people I admire are very clear that they do not have TV's in the house at all. They seem to get more done, have more well-rounded interests and seem happier and more intelligent. But they are vanishingly rare individuals. What do you think my wife would say if I suggested throwing out the TV?

I can't be like Bob. But I can be sympathetic to the vast majority who enjoy their daily dose of lies and just want to share opinions about the lies. Cutting myself off from the barrage of lies is just cutting myself off from my friends and loved ones.

If Bob wants to talk about Paul Bunyan and the stories of his life, I guess I can play along. So it goes with the news. So it goes with the biographies of famous people and bands. So it goes with most of mainstream history. Some of it is nonsense that only a child could believe. Some of it is like a Hallmark movie designed to hook a consumer and sell a product. It's all vaguely entertaining if you don't look too carefully or critically. I guess I can get by with that.

I will always be interested in learning the truth. But I don't want the search for truth to ruin my life. The facts in a particular case are not as important as the aims of the people pulling the strings. Although the agents are an ever-changing cast of actors playing a bewildering variety of roles, the string-pullers are a very small minority who can be identified, at the very least with hind-sight. The gambits are transparent, the goals are perennial, the tactics are predictable. The long term plans now interest me more than how fake a dummy looks. I know they use dummies; I don't need to compile an exhaustive proof of it. Once they use a particular strategy I can assume they will use it until they come up with a more effective strategy.

But Bob doesn't want to hear about it. Nor could he do anything about it anyway. The people who could do something are paid to not do anything. That's the facts. I think it comes down to how best to live with the facts as they are. There will always be someone outraged at a lie, and in a small town there may be a chance to turn things right side up again. However, most Americans live in cities, and most cities are willing to do whatever it takes to attract Federal funding. Should I undermine the chances for my town to secure Federal funding by hosting a live drill with Homeland Security? Who am I to threaten the livelihoods of my friends and neighbors? And then there's Bob.

Bob doesn't care.