Correspondence and collusion between the New York Times and the CIA
Mark Mazzetti’s emails with the CIA expose the degradation of journalism that has lost the imperative to be a check to power
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia
This an interesting article, as most of Glenn’s are, but that really isn’t what prompted me to blog on it. Rather it was this paragraph…
The more important objection is that the fact that a certain behavior is common does not negate its being corrupt. Indeed, as is true for government abuses generally, those in power rely on the willingness of citizens to be trained to view corrupt acts as so common that they become inured, numb, to its wrongfulness. Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people’s minds from something objectionable into something acceptable. Indeed, many people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism – oh, don’t be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
It relates to a comment yesterday by DaWei yesterday:
Frankly, choosing Obama suggests that you have given up, totally, on ever becoming anything at all, however badly the odds are stacked against you…
I see more than a little bit of ‘given up, totally’ in me, as I am sure my reader(s) have, and I feel in large part it is because of stuff like Glenn’s column and what I feel is the entirely pointless act of voting. I would like to feel there is some way to reverse the tide (though, if really a ‘tide’, then one must presume it will ebb at some point), but am really struggling with ways of doing so. I recall reading once somewhere a line describing a cynic as an optimist that had been disappointed too many times. Perhaps that is the case with me. I would love to hear ideas to combat our decaying society, though a bit of the historian in me tries to shout that for most of our nation’s history our government has been at least as corrupt and dirty as it is today, yet most of the time it functions well. Perhaps as a long-run sort of thing, but I recall reading about how bad things got during the depression, in particular, how the depression didn’t really start until many years after the crash when very ill advised decisions were made by our government beholden to the monied special interests. If any of that sounds familiar (I trust it does), then we are looking at the likely prospects of getting to repeat that all over again. As I recall, it took WWII to get our economy out of the dumps from the great depression and the major reason our country had such a long expansion after WWII was because we had bombed the hell out of our manufacturing competitors, thus enjoyed a monopoly for a while.
I just can’t shake the conviction that things are vastly more likely to get worse before there is any chance of things getting better. I sure would like to be wrong! I am happy with being a silly idiot worrying that the sky is falling; please let it be so…
