Deja Vu... Again

Let me tell you why very little that I read in the news surprises me. Nothing really ever changes. We change the names of the players. We change the location of where things are happening. We change the names of the wars about which we are reading. We change the names of the usually clueless politicians who are contributing to global warming by blasting out more hot air. We change names, but as a species, we keep making the same stupid, mindless mistakes over and over again.

One of the ABC reporters has his own blog. In one of his posts, he reported his reaction when he returned from five or six weeks in Iraq this year. He was reacting to the huge preoccupation in this country with the Jennifer Anniston/Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie brouhaha. He had just come from a country that currently exists in an evironment of complete chaos and a place where you never know if you are going to come home alive or not. It was the kind of culture shock that puts our American society in a rather poor light.

Hey, folks, there is nothing new about the dismay this reporter was expressing about our society's apparently skewed priorities. I was rummaging through some old Time magazines and I came across a particular issue from 1998. At the end of each issue, there is a feature called The Final Word. This particular op-ed piece was up in arms over the fact that the United States was still knee-deep the big "controversy" over then President Clinton's fling with Monica Lewinsky. At the same time, what was getting lost in the news was the continuing problems in Rwanda, where a few years earlier, one of the worst cases of genocide, in modern history, took place. The author asked: Why was Lewinski-gate on the front page of the paper daily, while the question of genocide in Rwanda was buried on page 10, if anything was written about Rwanda at all.

Like I said, not a lot surprises me. Mankind seems incapable of learning from its mistakes. So I don't intend to get too stressed out when the third and fourth American expeditions march into Iraq sometime in the future. There is little I can do as one individual to impact the course of this war in Iraq. Instead, I will just veg out and pour myself a very nice glass of chardonnay. If you can't beat the idiots who are supposed to be running our world, and you don't want to join them, do what I do. Watch a reality tv show. Much better.