The Sound You Heard

On Keith Olbermann tonight, one of his guests said the sound we all heard last night during "The ABC Debate" was 50 million shoes hitting TV sets across America. I think that was a conservative estimate.

Watching this giant disney crapfest, full of crap questions, poised by crap journalists, droning on and on, I did not throw my shoes, but that was only because I wasn't wearing any. Numbed by the excruciating triviality of the questions, but determined to see it through to the bitter end, I adopted the classic "Scream" posture:

THE SCREAM (painted in 1893) by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, depicts an agonized figure derived from an actual moment in Munch's life when he experienced an intense sunset that "filled the sky with tongues of fire". He wrote in his diary that he "paused, feeling exhausted and had to lean on a fence, trembling with anxiety, as an infinite scream passed through nature". The bloody sky was probably the aftermath of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 whose ejected ash turned the skies red in most of Europe and Asia. The person depicted is not screaming but protecting himself from the scream of nature. It is considered a reflex reaction typical of anyone struggling to keep out distressing noise.

I think "The Scream" really captures the frustration that anyone watching last night's debate hoping for some real discussion of real issues must have felt.

This debate really was the worst I have ever seen. Many online sources and blogs apparently agree. Enigma has put up excellent posts on the debate itself as well as contact information if you wish to express your opinion about the whole debacle.

I can only add my personal feelings of despair over the media wasting so much time & effort on crap questions, forcing the candidates to explain things they have already explained many times instead of addressing the very real & urgent issues that our next president will have to confront.

Where were the real questions? This was nothing more than a shim-sham show of shameful sad sycophantic suck-up shills!

ABC could've incorporated Robert Reich's recent blog about Obama and Bitterness and Old Politics into their debate questions. He points out, "we are heading into the worst economic crisis in a half century or more. Consumers are at the end of their ropes, fuel and food costs are skyrocketing, they can't go deeper into debt, they can't pay their bills." He also notes, "HRC and McCain seek to make political hay out of choices of words that can be spun cynically by mindless spinners of the old politics ... demagogues on the right and left continue to try to channel the cumulative frustrations of Americans into politics of resentment ... but 80% of Americans know the nation is on the wrong track. The old politics and the old media are irrelevant now."

As if to prove Mr. Reich's point, Charlie Gibson and George StephanopoulASS focused on meaningless tacky flag lapel pins!

Another real concern is our health care mess. If you watched the debate, you probably missed PBS's Frontline, Sick Around the World, detailing how five capitalist democracies have handled their health care. Click on the link to watch the full program, or view each country separately. Germany & Switzerland have systems that we could easily adopt here tomorrow. Taiwan's & Japan's systems would be more difficult, but are ones we could work toward. Great Britain's system has the longest history of providing health care as a basic right. One thing all these systems have in common is a national recognition that health care should be a non-profit enterprise.

Well, those are only two areas that ABC could've delved into. We all know there are many others, but most of the media seem to think we only care about crap. I wonder what Edvard Munch would've painted if he'd personally endured these debate questions. Instead of a bloody sky, I'm envisioning a cesspool sky (same agonized human, though).