Djelloul Marbrook

There’s a reason the media misuse the public airwaves to bathe us in rant disguised as journalism—it’s cheap. In every sense of the word.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, et al, cost their bosses little more than their salaries, while decent journalism costs a great deal of money, proving, I suppose, the adage that money is the root of all evil.

Rant journalism and infotainment disguise a gigantic rip-off. For that reason, we’d all be better served to watch the Discovery and History Channels and read more.

Did I say read more? Well, there’s a problem there, too, isn’t there? Thoughtful books, newspapers and magazines cost more money than celebrity muck.

All this raises the much larger question of what sort of society we want. The journalistic answer seems to be the society we can afford. So what kind of society can’t we afford? For example, can we afford a society of pirates in thousand-dollar suits picking our pockets, which seems to be the emerging picture of the Wall Street bailout? Who is being bailed out, if not the culprits?

Can we afford a winner-take-all society in which the very people who concerned Jesus Christ most are left to sicken and die because the rest of us keep on electing politicians who reduce taxes on the rich until no money is left to help anyone? (Except military contractors, of course.) Is this what family values mean? What’s mine is mine and to hell with you?

Is this what the pundits mean when they call us the most churchgoing nation in the world? Churchgoing maybe, but it sure doesn’t sound Christian to me. Or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, for that matter. What it sounds like is a bunch of greedy bastards all dolled up in their own hypocrisy.

We must decide if our society is about money, or if money is a means to an end. In which case, what end? The debate about Social Security, health care, education, environment, energy, transportation and infrastructure always turns on money. Anyone who says we must spread the burden more evenly is tarred as a socialist, or worse, a communist, which of course puts Jesus Christ in an awkward position. Here I take notice that the Catholic Church, whose views I don’t invariably share, has gladly joined him in that awkward spot when it comes to immigrants.

Christianity lived for many centuries in societies that were not capitalist. Indeed the word capitalism was invented to distinguish Western entrepreneurial societies from communism. Capitalism is not synonymous with Christianity or with any other belief system that happens to command taking care of our poorest and most helpless citizens. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins, but where are the mouthy family values Christians on this?

Until the 1960s the Republican party believed we should take care of one another while taking care not to abandon commonsense business practices or run up huge government deficits. But then the party was kidnapped by ideologues, some of them with very strange ideas about Christ’s concern for the poor. Or should I say these ideologues seem to wish he had gone much lighter on helping others and much heavier on who isn’t one of them? These ideologues blame everyone who doesn’t agree with them. Christ just wasn’t very obliging, which is why we remember him. He wasn’t nearly as obliging towards big shots as our Christian right is towards corporados. These ideologues try to demonize the gentle democracies of Europe and the United Kingdom, which have higher taxes but preserve civil liberty while buying their citizens clean air, good water, free public education, cheap transportation and energy, free health care—not to mention those tidy roads, bridges, tunnels and dams. Not to mention the fact that they throw out the leaders who lie to them instead of re-electing them. Are they just a lot smarter than we are thanks to their excellent free education?

And speaking of all the above services we in the richest country in the world can’t afford—what about the military? Is the military our defense force, which it was always conceived to be, or is it a moneymaking machine for Halliburton, Blackwater and every other contractor that buys off Congress and the White House? What about the billions of dollars we feed this monster, even in countries that despise us? And if free-wheeling, unregulated capitalism is so good why is our health care system the most expensive in the world but ranks only thirty-third in quality? Could it be because it’s socialism for the HMOs and the insurers?

We’re getting rant journalism and drug entertainment, which is really what celebrity news is—we’re being drugged on trivia—for the same reason we’re getting Wall Street swindlers and their bailout buddies in Washington. Greed. The politicians promise us perfume and give us toxic waste.—DM

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