Hostage

Like the guy on the floor of a bank during the holdup, a woman tied to a post during the raid, the criminal enterprise and narrative reduces the lives, the hopes and dreams, of the average guy to background noise. That is the message of The Big Short. Money and power are the elephants on the plains. We are just poor critters. The Japanese murder squads called their victims "logs." Atwood's women are "furniture." All are background noise to the real direction, the real story. Everything--honesty, human dignity, everything--is sacrificed to the Greater Narrative.
And so it is with our political experiment.
Gawker writes that at least one U.S. reporter traded content in his article for information from Hillary Clinton’s staff while she was Secretary of State. In what is an astonishing documented exchange--this is all from released documents--, the reporter agreed to insert specific words and imagery into his article in return for a copy of Hillary’s upcoming speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. He wrote his article to the specifications of the person he was reviewing! His name? Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic!

In another instance, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, promised to deliver positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate exchange, permitted  Philippe Reines, Senior Advisor to United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to ghost-write an item about the State Department for Politico’s Playbook newsletter. His article was ghost-written by the department he was reviewing! 

This is terrible stuff and one wonders if the democracy can stand it. The manipulation and distortion--where we expect honesty and  insight--is shocking but the implication of this layer of political-journalistic symbiosis implies a casual cynicism, a hand-glove cronyism that should, in an honest world, cause its implosion.  

Maybe that's what Trump and Sanders are: The implosion.

(A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.– H.L. Mencken)