Does everyone get the Sunday Night Blues? Generally, I just get on with it, but sometimes I feel a bit of dread about Monday. I enjoy my job, really I do, but the longer I do it, the more concern I have about peoples’ states of mind.
I could write a fresh post every day about the texts we receive during the CJBK morning show. Recently, after the death of Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, someone asked, “Why aren’t you talking about the death of freedom-of-speech advocate Ernst Zundel?” So I responded, “You mean hateful, Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel?” And they wrote back, “The truth hurts, does it?”
My jaw hit the floor but it really shouldn’t have, because we get this sort of stuff all the time.
Some say, Alex Jones, host of Infowars, is pulling the greatest gag on the American (and many Canadian) people as he invents and then spreads outlandish conspiracy theories. Like Stephen Colbert’s right-wing blowhard on The Colbert Report, some believe Jones is only playing a character. The problem is that his audience takes him seriously. He’s the guy who claimed the shooting at Sandy Hook was a hoax and the parents of victims were actually being paid by the government to keep the ruse going. One of his latest theories is that Michelle Obama is a transgender man. He posts pictures of her dress puckering in the front where he says the evidence is. We still hear from people who will only refer to Barack Obama as Barry, because of a falsehood spread about the former President using the pseudonym when he frequented gay bath-houses. (There is no evidence of this other than the one discredited source.) I could go on.
I used to work with a woman who announced proudly, “I believe in conspiracy theories!” All of them? “Yes, all of them” she shot back in a “duh” kind of tone. So no matter who comes up with the theory and how much evidence there is for or against it, she’s on board. Great.
I wonder if some people latch on to tales about the moon landing being shot on a sound stage and that NASA is keeping from us that the earth is really flat, because they think it makes them seem smarter than the rest of us who accept the mainstream, proven story. Someone should tell them it doesn’t. I exchanged texts recently with a man who claimed all mass murders have been carried out by Muslims. What about Anders Breivik in the Netherlands and Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma, I asked. Both were admitted Christians. “Oklahoma City was an inside job, carried out by the FBI.” You can’t argue with that because all you’ll get in return is an accusation that you’re part of the mainstream media machine that wants to give easy answers to the “sheeple”. There’s no logic, no reason. Teams of journalists all around the world somehow come to inaccurate conclusions while one twisted talk show host in the US gets it right? If you need me, I’ll be huddled in the woods, hugging a copy of We the Media and rocking slowly back and forth.
I don’t get the Sunday night blues, I get the early morning blues as I wonder what foolish, outlandish claims and statements may come out of the Whitehouse and who may actually believe them. I wonder if society will wake up and catch itself before it’s too late and will democracy and rights survive.
It’s all insanity – and there always was this kind of fringe lunacy, but the internet has given every person and their fractured fairy tales a platform. I remember my grandmother’s response when I told her the stories in her favourite tabloid were garbage: “how could they print it if it wasn’t true?”. I think there is a certain fraction that still believes in some kind of laws of truth and it has to be the truth if it’s out there. Alex Jones is one of the loudest, worst offenders and scariest of all is that the US “leader” thinks he’s terrific. As I said, it’s all insanity. I feel for you.