On a weekend fresh off the glaring light of the Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs, and as a massive oil slick bore down on our southern wetland coastline, another story suddenly "breaks" and blows these two major issues off the top spot in the news cycle.
What we had last Friday was news that capsulized two of the great issues before us as a society: 1) the vast fraud and malfeasance of the financial sector that designed and delivered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, profiting immensely as trillions of taxpayer dollars and fantasy Fed funds gushed to the rescue; and 2) a story that graphically illustrated the importance of our diminishing energy situation, where we now have to drill off shore in water a mile deep and sink pipelines another six miles into the earth's crust to find oil, only to have it blow up in our face and contaminate huge fishing and wildlife areas in a mega disaster--again, all of our own making. The region generates $3 trillion of our $12 trillion annual GDP. The oil could destroy this area and decimate the fishing industries there, not to mention the impact it will have on wildlife and then oil prices in general, now at about $86 a barrel. These two major issues remain unsolved, unreformed and gushing like an uncapped well. We have no solutions, and no real plan of action, except to apparently to forget them and worry instead about "terrorists" at the top of the news hour.
By Monday, a scant two days later, what gets top billing in the news? An unexploded bomb in an SUV in Times Square. Our old friend "terrorism" the great non issue of our time, has conveniently made a timely return to sweep the airwaves and cover the enormous issues underlying the two real stories it replaced. Compared to the Goldman-Sachs tip of the iceberg fraud investigation and the Deepwarer Horizon catastrophe, we now get the reflexive much ado about nothing "ongoing coverage" of an incident that injured not one single soul. In fact, combine all terrorist acts ever perpetrated together in one lump sum and you fail to get damage even a fraction of that which the big banks and investment houses delivered to cities, neighborhoods, and homes all across this nation.
But hey, the cover story leads with the big "T" for terrorism. So just like we did during all the other non-issue "terrorist" events under Bush, (Richard Reid's bungled attempt to light his shoes on fire, and other attacks that failed spectacularly,) this latest event was just perfectly timed to distract the media and nation from the two major stories that threaten the very fabric of our nation and society.
As the Church Lady might put it: "How convenient!"
