The story of the day

by Capt. Fogg

Bleary-eyed, the zombie turns on the TV, holding the antidote, the cup of coffee in one hand hoping to see whether UK retains it's U.  "After the break we're back with the story of the day" says the talking head, or the panel of happy-talk bobbleheads.  The story of the day, of course is the new iPhone.

The latest thing from Apple, the news from McDonalds, the celebrity "selfie" of the day. No point in checking the Benghazi channel. It's back to Al Jazeera where I get my answer and am reminded of the size and complexity of our world.  All sorts of things going on, scary stuff, important stuff Americans never hear about unless it happens to coincide with the story of the week, which seems to be the NFL and domestic violence.  We'll be clucking and squawking about something else as the flock follows next weeks' theme. Some other occurrence will convince us that something which is actually getting better is getting worse or that some one in a hundred million happening means we can't go outside anymore -- at least on the side of the news I watch. On the other side it will still be Benghazi and the milquetoast Muslim tyrant and how he's mishandled this or that.

In the trade, they call it "native" advertising.  The movie where the ultramacho hero always drives a Audi or BMW, news stories straight from the press releases of  video game vendors, the latest shake from McDonalds or of Miley Cyrus' ass.  And of course most of the news network's day is advertising and most of the actual news has to be sufficiently sensational, captivating, outrageous or otherwise sufficiently fetching to make the other glassy-eyed zombies sit through the endless bits of theater where toady, underpowered souless and boring econoboxes are made to seem like race cars and other products are equally misrepresented as the goals of all your pathetic worldly aspirations.

Scotland?  Oh yeah, they're still part of the UK for the time being and some 80 or 90 percent of the voters showed up at the polls. I guess those people don't have anything better to do in their sad little world.

What happened was. . .

By Capt. Fogg

It's been said so often we might as well attribute it to everyone: "we don't see things the way they are, we see them the way we are." So much in life hinges on tiny details. Things nearly identical can be seen in such enormously different fashion and we rarely seem to ask ourselves what the difference is. Sometimes the only difference is the way we are.

In a small Texas town yesterday, the Sheriff pulled 24-year-old Joshua Manuel Lopez's car over in a suburban neighborhood. Lopez had an outstanding warrant for graffiti. There was a scuffle, Sheriff Michael Pimentel was fatally shot.

What we think happened has so much to do with who we are. Much has to do with how the story is presented to us and this time, for some reason, CNN only gave us the bare bones facts, no a priori conclusions were jumped to. But there were so many ways of presenting this and as the metaphorical butterfly can set off a hurricane, it's the minute subtleties of our perception and the writer's perception that determine whether we sigh and go on to the next story, whether we feel bad for the officer, whether we see it as police brutality -- whether we talk about the way police treat minorities, write headlines about an innocent murdered for a misdemeanor or about those probably illegal Hispanics ruining America. There is far more than beauty in the eye of the beholder.

I doubt that the president will show up at the funeral or that the streets of Elmendorf, Texas will see loud and violent protest and I have to ask just how different is this case from other cases. Might it have been different if the ethnicity had been different, if the presumption of malice had been inserted in the coverage, if the trajectory of the bullet had varied by an inch or two? But my perception is meaningless, it's what the public thinks that matters. This is not an art museum and whether the painting is a Picasso or a Pissarro is not determined by the frame. It's determined by you and with whom you choose to side; by what causes you identify with, what party you belong to and what news you listen to. Perhaps the Buddhists are right and it's all an illusion, a great emptiness we fill with ourselves.

Will someone accuse me of racism here? of being unsympathetic? It doesn't matter and the "I" who wrote this is the you who are reading it. Nothing is true, all things are permitted.