This is more starting over than starting anew. My son gave me this web page, for which I thank him. This allows me to reappear in print after an absence of several years. Good manners observed, I can turn now to the business at hand, a weekly sharing of the looking glass view of current events. This will not be in a faddish mode of bemoaning the happenings for what they were, nor a simple countering of conventional wisdom.  The facts often speak for themselves. We only need to pay them due attention. 

My primary interests, foreign affairs (especially globalization and terrorism), intelligence and politics are not just what I know best; they also promote the looking glass viewpoint because they are commonly not tolerated well by Americans, who are dependent on the media for what little they hear about the outside world. Goaded by a strong, media-fed bias toward conflict, Americans commonly think that: foreigners belong overseas, so that we don’t have to pay attention to their squabbles; intelligence professionals are less reliable than weathermen; and politicians seldom use the truth because they can’t seem to recognize it. 

From time to time, I will touch on both global economics and terror, if only to undo gross media distortions. The media agitate the public with threatening views about the world, precluding effective solutions to its real impact on American society and politics because international economics and global terrorism require a level of sustained thought that most network anchor-persons are incapable of providing. Fortunately for the anchors, we are not a thoughtful people. 

Since we are at the beginning of the media silly season of August, in the middle of an election year, I’m opening with politics as this week’s topic. 

The real world spoils politicians’ pronouncements because immediate events are not often important events. Under a media-driven time pressure, when the politicians have figured out the angles, the subject is no longer of much public interest. Thus, politicians have to play catch up while spinning the news to claim that they always have been ahead of the game. Time also feeds the media’s race to be first, which they often claim, regardless of the facts. Fortunately for them, the American audience is more interested in people and sports than policy, so the mismatch between puffery and the real significance of events often goes unrecognized by the media, the politicians and the American public at large.

Americans are adamant democrats, not because of any intense interest in government, but because the selection of office holders gives them the frequent spectacle of horse-race style elections. In this country, elections are a chance to indulge in the sin of gambling while earning bragging rights for doing a public duty.  In the face of such fun, the idea of resolving issues doesn’t have a chance. If the horse-race ends up as a slugfest with the prospect of a candidate ending up on the ropes, so much the better.  We are up against a fact of human nature: On most issues, most of the time, most people — don’t care. The media help sustain this attitude by pushing the slightest difference toward the appearance of Armageddon, and often end up inventing a battle where dull reality usually falls short of expectations. With such lively politics, who wants to attend to the daily dullness of government and its problems? The myth of politics as a righteous issue-oriented, debate-driven government selection process lives only in the minds of a handful of intellectuals who think that politics is too important and complex to leave to a public, which they see as ignorant, misguided, and selfish; none of which, by the way, is prohibited by the Constitution to voters, let alone politicians. Nor have they been shown to be ruinous to effective governing over two hundred and more years of American elections. It isn’t pretty; but it is effective; and sometimes, even historic. You can’t ask for much more without overstepping a reasonable definition of human nature. The founding fathers did everything they could think of to allow ordinary folks to act as well as their betters without spoiling themselves.