Of Monstrous Woeful Paper
This Is Not Your Father’s Mishap
I’ve been watching debates and speeches and soundbites and videobites and reality bites. I’ve kept my ear to the grindstone, my eyes on the prize. I’m confused.
Any system as large as the U.S. economy, let alone an international economy, cannot be encapsulated in a two-hour series of rhetorical jabs. In the entirety of the coverage of Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s plans, there have been a choice few moments approaching clarity on the topic, and too few to know what either plan might hope to achieve. It should go without saying, moreover, that this is only the political extremity of a much larger monster, a body of discourse that excels in vapidity.
Leave it to public radio, and the program of one Ira Glass, to shed some real light on the difficulty of the issue, and some of the nuance. In episode #365 of This American Life, Glass et al bring the pain. You can’t avoid it, so you might as well look straight on as an arm and leg are not-so-cleanly cleaved from your weakening body.
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