Confession

Nobody asked but …

Hate is not in my normal vocabulary, but I must admit to four Trump Towers of Despise in my life.  Trump, Giuliani, reality television, and corporate news mongering.

The first two blighted my life in 1985 when I lived in Manhattan, NYC for 9 weeks.  Both, although unconnected at the time, were on local news every night, pandering for attention.  Real publicity whores were they.

Organized pop journalism first drew my ire in 1962, when I was convinced by my freshman composition English Professor that what passed for journalism was a very low form of human expression.  I thought that this was an isolated cultural phenomenon, as well.

Then, reality television came along, an affliction on the modern world.  I associate its origin with that of Survivor in 1997.  Surely people were not going to be fooled by this cheapskate substitute for drama and honest documentary.  I thought the thinness of this fare would doom it early on.  PS — I can only take pride in the fact that I have never, ever, watched this drivel.

But, I was asleep, like most others.  These separate toxic streams were to converge and pool in a cultural sludge pit.  The four towers became the four heads of a monster.  These horrors converged.  Now the cesspool of POTUS, POTUS’s lickspittles, the wrongheadedness of reality redone by charlatans, the fake news misreported on the whole mess has mired us in an airless swamp.

— Kilgore Forelle

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