Politics, News & Addiction

Anyone who follows my rants and some of my longer format posts will know that I am busting my ass to get past the obsessive compulsive tendencies I tend to exhibit when it comes to politics and the media.

The trouble us that these days, politics is the gift that keeps on giving. And the media out there simply can’t give enough.

It has gotten so ridiculous that I look at CNN and, to a lesser extent, CBC, as a kind of weird source of entertainment. All these fuckin’ opinions, all this fuckin’ speculation. It’s more fun than a Jack Reacher novel.

And so what happens is you get stuck there. And it’s so damn much fun that you start thinking of regular TV as kinda dull in comparison.

Indeed the 24 hour news cycle, and the need to fill it with something, mostly speculative, has turned many of us into perverts. Voyeurs looking to make sure we get every last morsel of speculation so we can make educated guesses about what’s really going on, while at the same time, understanding all too well that we will never really know.

What a fucking paradox.

For the past couple years especially, and everybody knows why, I have felt the need to comment on this stuff. Not to enlighten anyone or even to try and change a mind or two, but mostly just to get it the fuck out of my system. Because the truth, and this is the only true thing I know about anything anymore, is that the news is an addiction.

A lot of the comments I get on my posts confirm this to me, because for a long time I wasn’t really sure I was hooked. But over the past couple of months some things have finally become clear in my head and I realized that this shit is a form of poison.

I have come to the belief that the 24 hour news cycle isn’t an invention of the news industry, but but a marketing tool for big business. Because if you follow the money, which is a universal truth, that’s right where you end up. Creating anxiety and fear, then selling pills, potions and escape.

They get you hooked on something, like all the bullshit surrounding the news that everybody was happy to get in half an hour on a week night, to something that you actually (if you are addicted) need to follow for huge blocks of time. What’s Anderson’s take? What’s Chris Cuomo have to say? How pissed off is Don Lemon about that?

Sorry, I don’t get Fox News, but it’s probably the same for all the conservatives.

Politics has become the TV drama of the 24 hour news cycle. And it sucks.

Now you could be chuckling at this little rant, and say to yourself, why doesn’t he just turn the fucking shit off. And you’d have a good point. But it’s not that easy.

But the good news is that I am making progress. The drama that I used to perceive the news to be is slowly turning to comedy. The next phase after that is that it simply becomes a farce, and the farce is much easier to walk away from, because while you were happily addicted before, now you’re feeling stupid for participating.

It’s not going to work that way for everyone, but it will for me. Everything is a process these days. Getting unhooked from the abject ridiculousness of all that’s going on in the world is critical to the survival of your sanity.

And if there’s one thing I have been perfectly adequate at in this life is holding onto that. So far.