It was a cheap, addictive entertainment.

Like Netflix.
Like porn.
Like the buildup to the Super Bowl.

The big event, as far as most media was concerned, was the landfall in Florida. This, it seemed, was the point to which all of our lives were leading, the apocalypse that was sure to prove whatever it was we needed proved. Days, perhaps even weeks before this happened, there was wall to wall coverage promising cataclysm. I learned to fear the “Cone of Uncertainty” and “Life Threatening Winds,” I listened to talking heads as if they were debating some sport, and I watched relentless loops of footage of nature destroying any puny mortal concerns that stood in its path.

And as the hurricane carved out it’s terrible path, each demolished, little island a grim foreshadowing of what was about to happen to over-populated and under-prepared Florida, the hurricane was simultaneously a prophecy of doom and a trailer for a Hollywood disaster film. Almost giddy, each day the broadcasters revealed– in all its punitive majesty– another verse in this Book of Revelations.

The media, of course, profited from our obsessive fear, and turned the volume up as loud as they could. The more clicks the better, and if it was terror and anxiety that ushered in these clicks, so be it. At one point a rain-soaked reporter, bent and staggering against the elements, conducted an urgent interview with a man who had not evacuated. Clearly the reporter was hoping for some Florida Man archetype to emerge from the scrub, a guy who looked like Kid Rock and was armed with a crossbow and some alligator mace, and wasn’t going to let some “lady storm” tell him what to do.

Instead, the reporter got a genius cardiologist, who with astonishing knowledge, detail and reasoning, explained precisely why it was safe to be exactly where he was. He was calm, too, not a trace of panic to him, and he made the reporter look like the very bad actor he was.

That the media manipulates and distorts news events, or even creates disaster porn, is nothing new. When 9/11 took place I literally could not take my eyes off the tv.

It was the most riveting thing I had ever seen, and it was a rating’s sensation. Now, with all our various technologies even further entrenched, this sense of chaos and anxiety has become a permanent, immobilizing fixture of our lives. The media, desperate to make a buck, feed us all the worst case scenarios, whipping us into a frenzy of panicky, dependent consumption.

My level of excitement had reached such heights that when Hurricane Irma finally struck Florida, I was actually disappointed–like I would be if I saw a movie where the trailers were better than the actual product they were selling.

This is completely perverse and backwards, but there you have it.

It is instructive when you’re caught in the swift currents of one of these types of stories to look up beyond your computer screen and out the window.

Remind yourself that we are actually living in the safest time in history.

( https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove )

Go outside, for surely something beautiful will fall to you.

adding that he, too,  just like a Regular Joe, enjoyed watching the life-simulations depicted on television programs. It was as if some rudimentary form of Artificial Intelligence, one that existed in a strange human-like form that for all it’s advanced technology just couldn’t get the hair right, was trying to prove its humanity to a skeptical public. It was so clumsy it was almost sweet– like a grandparent saying YOLO in the wrong context.

However, the truly funny thing about this pronouncement was that nobody, not a single politician from any party, had ever suggested that they had a plan to tax Netflix. With this, it seemed that the Conservative strategy was laid bare—they were going to announce a really horrible, really unpopular idea every week, and then assure the public that they would fight tooth and nail against such an appalling idea. This tactic would confuse the public, who would mistakenly think that the combative stance assumed by the Conservatives meant that one of the other political parties had actually proposed the idea and that taxing Netflix would be essential to their governance.

Out of nothing, something– it was the conjuring of a perfectly evil plan.

In keeping with this theme, the next thing that Harper announced was also incredibly weird, only on this occasion instead of lining himself up in opposition to the weirdness, he was trying to initiate it. Stephen Harper suggested banning Canadians from traveling to terrorist-controlled countries.  The idea behind this would be preemptive, serving to stop young, naive, would-be-jihadists from traveling to Syria, being trained by their dark forces, and then sent back, with ISIS flags now sown on their backpacks, to destroy the homeland.

This notion, crazy, paranoiac, wholly against the Charter and impossible to implement, seemed positively Trumpian in its blunt vulgarity. However, the point was never to impose such absurdity on the population, but to get the other parties to argue against it, thus making them look soft on terror.

It’s PSYOP’s, really, with the ruling government attempting to spread disinformation and confusion in an attempt to manipulate the mood of the electorate so that they’re not actually voting based on information, but on a “gut-feeling.” People will “feel” like the NDP want to tax Netflix simply because Harper said he was against doing such a thing, and after all, the NDP tax everything anyway, right? Likewise, people’s fears that the Liberals are soft on terror (Trudeau’s always getting his picture taken with Muslims!)

will only be reinforced, because now the Liberals have to argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with traveling to a country that most people associate only with blood-thirsty terrorists.

Harper’s strategy is to set off smoke bombs.

He’s not interested in persuading people with his inventive policy, but in sowing uncertainty and even fear, so that the undecided and those who don’t follow politics all that closely, the people who don’t really know what’s going on (because Harper has set about creating this bewildering cloud of Orwellian uncertainty and double-talk) will take the path of least resistance and opt for “stability” and maintaining the status quo.

In a nutshell, it’s everything that’s wrong with politics.