Reasons I Generally Do Not Watch The Network News

#473) The actuaries say I have about twenty-five years left. There is apparently never going to be a guarantee that on any given night during that time Diana Spencer, late ex-wife of a participant in one of the world's most famous and last-remaining human inbreeding experiments, will not be a major story, no matter how dead she remains.

#474) There is an increasing likelihood that the news itself becomes stupider in an ever-downward spiral chasing the broadcasting of the aforementioned news. For example:

a) It was reported last night that George W. Bush, onetime President of the United States, is concerned about his legacy, and told someone or other that he saw himself as a latter-day Truman, unappreciated but finally justified fifty years hence.

1) This missed the point--which is only to be expected--that that isn't really what happened with Truman's reputation, but instead conflates what might be termed, on the one hand, reality with, on the other, the ad campaigns for a couple of Truman biographies, which is the sort of thing George W. Bush is a lot more likely to be familiar with.

2) It also misses the point that Truman had, even by the end of his life, begun to look better if only by comparison with what followed, and if that happens with George W. Bush (I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible) we'll all be dead and mercifully out of the reach of advertising.

b) This concern, coupled with the latest White House tactic of convening a new, ad hoc Iraq Study Group every seventy-two hours or so, led to further speculation about Bush's relationship with his father, known in common parlance as "Bush 41" the way that Spencer dame is known as "Princess Diana". [Is that just me? Doesn't the boarding-school-locker-room towel-snapping faux conviviality of "41" and "43" make one want to stick one's finger as far down one's throat as it will go? It's a constant reminder, at one and the same time, of the depths to which the public discourse has sunk into sitcom blather and of the fact that these two Bozos of Brahmatude are on our Permanent Record whether we personally deserve them or no, smothered in the rancid gravy of the attendant knowledge that Barbara Bush's sex life is now part of our national treasure. ]

1) It doesn't seem to strike any of the news hairdos that it may be the oddest, and possibly the saddest thing ever, at least since the invention of the vacuum tube, that the President of the United States can be spoken about--with as much seriousness as can be mustered in this comic age--in pop-psychological clinical terms which were, prior to his ascent to the national stage, the exclusive province of early adolescence. To my knowledge, "He's trying to outdo his father" has never before been uttered to explain the actions of anyone old enough to have a driver's license.

2) Which made me wonder, however briefly and insincerely, just what it might be like for the theoretical mentally-balanced wingnut who'd voted for the guy twice and now learns that on top of everything going to hell it has happened, basically, because his boy has the testicles of a hamster.