Elizabeth Scalia @ The Anchoress:
Somewhat apropos of what I have written here about rejecting the pop culture which drives much of conventional wisdom and traps us into mob thinking, I find myself repulsed by the number of comments I see in social media that run along the lines of “can’t wait to see what SNL does with the Petraeus story” and of course, the nonstop sniggerings perpetual adolescents bring to any salacious story.
A long time ago, when anticipating the sort of coup that has just taken place, I wrote:
We have lost our bearings and our boundaries so profoundly that we are no longer guarded, interiorly, against scam-artists and tricksters. […] And on the world stage there stride some masters of the sleight-of-hand and the misdirection – you can recognize them because they are all of a mind, and of a piece, and they are all working different parts of the same trick.
What we’re seeing with the Petraeus sexcapades is a classic magician’s misdirection. Two months past the attack on Benghazi, which resulted in the death of an American Ambassador and three others — an attack we are told the White House watched while ordering no response; an attack the mainstream media helpfully blacked-out, at first, then allowed to be spun — we are now being served The Prestige, where all of reality is being turned on its head, and the audience isn’t even sure what it’s seeing, so it simply becomes giddy, and content to be led.
If the nation is content to forget the image of Ambassador Chris Stevens’ naked body being hauled away by a crowd “taking him to the hospital where he later died”; if the nation is completely fine with a truly heinous story of government malfeasance, depraved indifference to human life, political calculation and incompetence being turned into bread and circuses for the mobs, well, then shame on the nation, for choosing to be entertained, once again, by the people who know that all the mob really wants is a show, and is quite pleased to give it to them.
