Journalistic whack-a-mole

For any journalist, trying to keep up with events of American stupidity and brutality is like trying to play whack-a-mole with a keyboard. I can’t get through one paragraph without something else hitting the wires. Fer instance, in the past few moments these stories are developing:

Twisted American tragedy #1: (Penn.) A 14-year-old Catholic school girl allegedly pulled a gun on another student and shot her.

Twisted American tragedy #2: (N.Y.) A 16-year- old mother reportedly threw her infant into the back yard, where it was devoured by vicious dogs. A most mortem is aiming to figure out if the baby was alive or dead when the hounds chowed down.

Twisted American tragedy #3: (Calif.) The saga of the Santana high school shooting continues, as a liberal media licks its chops like jackals as it provides saturation coverage of the tragedy.

Meanwhile, a newspaper headline screamed: “America searches its soul over its children.”

Uh, that’s my point entirely. America long ago gave up its soul. It traded it for prime time television, a venal class of entrenched Apparatchiks, and public school lectures on why Johnny has two daddies. Every manner of foul and nasty decadence is highlighted in parades, is flaunted in publically supported crusades of one stripe or another, and, mark my words, people are scared–literally scared–to speak up against it in a lot of venues. It’s gotten that bad.

In a sense, all the nation’s children have been thrown to the dogs.

Unfortunately, the few who venture to point these things out, no matter how diplomatically, seem so sour faced about it. Sez me: Chill out. You can’t stop America from an epidemic of moral decay. So why worry about it? Heck, we missed the fall of Rome, which musta’ been one helluva circus. But the Romans didn’t have pop-psychology, Oprah, Ritalin, Hillary and Bill, and the Child Molesters-lobbying-to-become-Scout Masters coalition.

If you mentioned any of these things to our grandparents a few decades ago, they’d say you were delusional to a Kafkesque degree. Nobody could dream up such a living, breathing freak show, they’d tell you. No great country could undergo such a foul and dark metamorphosis so quickly, they’d say. Those things happen in Europe, not here, young man.

Well, the decline has been so swift and foul that I am hard pressed to draw a sharp distinction between America and Europe any longer, with the possible exception that it’s easier to get a good cheeseburger in Chicago than in Paris.

The Commonwealth, of course, is caught between different worlds, and America’s weird slide won’t be echoed here 100 percent. But it will affect us, no doubt. And from this vast distance, a lot of folks will wonder why so many bizarre and twisted things are happening in Uncle Sugar’s land. This isn’t just the random zig and zag of bummer news stories. It is just the tip of the symptomatic iceberg.

But don’t take it too seriously. America chose this path on its own volition, and a nation with such sophistication and mind boggling wealth can’t be let off the hook entirely for the decisions it makes. They made this freak show themselves, and the tent on this circus is going to fall on all their heads, which is what a society gets when it tolerates the intolerable.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”