This week as I watched California burning and read in the evening paper that in five years 36% of our states will face a water shortage I thought that’s something we ought to be genuinely concerned about. The media was having a field day with California and it was a welcome relief not to hear about Brittany or one of the other celebrities who couldn’t stop drinking or taking drugs. Faux News went so far as to imply that perhaps these wildfires had been set by terrorists. The president flew over in a plane, made a political stump speech and went home. The governor flew over the fires too, as if overflight in an aircraft amounted to reducing the suffering on the ground. This week too we learned that Albus Dumbledore might be gay. Get real! There was a lot of saber rattling on Iran too. Chickenhawk senators and congressmen and their pundit allies and others who never wore any uniform in their lives were planning for new ways to send our sons and daughters into harms way for their own narrow aims.
What will historians record about an era when California burned, New Orleans sank, Iraq lie in ruin while our pundits and politicians worried about the sexual orientation of a fictional character.
Bill Maher has a good commentary on all of this. He’s delightful, insightful and damn funny too. Take some time to watch this clip. It’ll tickle you too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttEFsp5QGsQ]
To be fair, the news that Dumbledore is gay came from J.K. Rowling, in response to a fan question. Certainly, friends of mine who write fiction seem to know a great deal about their characters that never makes it into the final story – sometimes practically down to their toothpaste preferences. But at the same time, I tend to find the details that just don’t wind up fitting into the final story to be fairly boring and irrelevant. It doesn’t change anything in the story, so who cares?
As for politician flyovers, they’re pretend help. The politicians pretend they’re finding out about the damage, but frankly, they’d be better off in a train or otherwise on the ground, where they can see from a human level what’s going on. Even better would be to go to the shelters and talk to the people who have been displaced and the folks trying to help them. Then, instead of yammering to the press, get to it and start helping people. Yeesh.
But what do I know? I think we need to be worried more about our degrading infrastructure and the poisons we’ve put in our environment than about finding someone else to be afraid of and threaten. Silly me.