Dept. of Wouldn't it be pretty to think so

Eager to seize on even the suggest of fractiousness or weakness on the right, Salon suggests right-wing pundits are "on the defensive" about not taking bribes from the Bush administration. Yeah, I'll bet they're all real concerned about their credibility, which is so high in the first place.

Another example of left-coast hand-rubbing (you know, the kind of hand-rubbing that people do in cartoons when they're plotting something), based on the false assumption that these pundits' vast audience gives a shit about their credibility or independence. Clue: it's only educated, self-doubting leftists who worry about such things as credibility and journalistic independence; right-wingers stopped caring years ago. How else could people like Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rise to the top like so much greasy waste?

But not all that glitters is gold. The light reflecting off that sludge sometimes looks pretty -- ooh, a rainbow! Not a gay one either! Looked at from any other angle, it's crap. And someday, people's perspectives will change.

I was listening last night to the BBC, which is broadcast on a local NPR station from midnight to 5 a.m.; I become drowsy listening to those nice British accents. One report was from some devastated third-world country, and whether it was Sri Lanka or Iraq doesn't matter. A perky British lass posed this question to some woman, a widow who was inexplicably not suicidally depressed: What are your hopes and dreams for your country?"

I don't remember what the woman answered -- something fairly reasonable and not too out-of-reach, probably containing the word "rebuilding." But I was still focused on the question. What if someone asked me about my "hopes and dreams" for my country? I realized that I would have a less hopeful outlook than even that devastated refugee. I lay there in the dark as the report went on, wracking my brain, trying to come up with an optimistic but realistic view of what my country would look like in five, ten or twenty-five years.

The pictures I was getting weren't pretty -- Hyper-consumerism on the Japanese-cum-Chinese scale. Coastal cities being swamped by global warming. Species extinction. Sprawl paving over open space. The death of American unions. Increasing censorship, surveillance and crypto-fascist laws. A progressive "movement" being diminished to nothing more than nostalgia for the New Deal or the post-Sixties.

When the Nixon administration starts to look like the good old days (here's just one example), you know you're in trouble. Wasn't everything supposed to just keep getting better? What the fuck happened to the genuine idealism of the 60s and 70s?