Wednesday, March 30, 2016

New Day



Yeah, so this is just another go-read suggestion.

It's Tom Engelhardt talking not just about the elections cycle, but also the state of the state.  His suggestion is that we're moving through a new normal,   There are touch points at our military, national security, media and election cycle.  The normalization of the extra ordinary...

In some way, all of this could be said to work. At the very least, it is a functioning new system-in-the-making that we have yet to truly come to grips with, just as we haven’t come to grips with a national security state that surveils the world in a way that even science fiction writers (no less totalitarian rulers) of a previous era could never have imagined, or the strange version of media overkill that we still call an election. All of this is by now both old news and mind-bogglingly new.
Do I understand it? Not for a second.
This is not war as we knew it, nor government as we once understood it, nor are these elections as we once imagined them, nor is this democracy as it used to be conceived of, nor is this journalism of a kind ever taught in a journalism school. This is the definition of uncharted territory. It’s a genuine American terra incognita and yet in some fashion that unknown landscape is already part of our sense of ourselves and our world...

Here is a link to the whole article.


(Side note, this is the third or forth article I have read in recent days that keys in on our volunteer military and it's modern function as a manner of business, Maybe that is coincidence, the talking point of the week, or something?)

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