Denial and Distraction

Last week I went to a seminar where one of the big analysts from Wachovia Securities assured the group that Lehman Brothers would never go the way of Bear Stearns. We all woke up Monday morning with the news that Lehman was filing for bankruptcy, the largest in American history, and that Bank of America was purchasing the venerable investment house Merrill Lynch at bargain prices. The stock market fell 500 points and most of us over the age of fifty added another two-five years before we would be able to retire.

John McCain that morning said the "fundamentals of our economy are strong." By the afternoon as the blood flowed from the New York Stock Exchange, he changed his story to sound like a born-again populist: "the economy is in crisis."

This is the same man who admitted during the primaries that he didn't know much about domestic economics.

This is the same man who cynically chose a woman as his vice presidential candidate whose gun-toting rhetoric inspires late-night bathroom fantasies for American men, but does not inspire any confidence that she knows anything about governing, foreign policy, or even how the constitution operates. Do you trust these people with your future?

The American media, remember, is controlled by conglomerates and corporations. We cannot rely on newspapers, television, even "the nightly news" as a reputable source of real news. It's just fabricated news. Instead we have to find our sources and then spread them. Hence the blogs, hence the informal networks that Malcolm Gladwell described in "The Tipping Point." We have to spread our own campaigns, and we have to create talking points so that each of us who wants this country to move back towards its democratic potential can speak one-to-one with everyone, not just among our circle of friends, to speak with calm.

Are we ready to heal?