President Barack Obama is less than 24 hours from officially announcing a massive expansion of the war effort in Afghanistan and, yet, the lead story on tonights CBS news on channel 2 was about Tiger Woods (and no story on the war, whatsoever). It’s as if the folks at CBS New York read Chris Hedges’ Truthdig column today and wanted to prove him right.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
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Hank Kalet 
I agree with most of what Hedges says in that truthdig article. But Americans have been obsessed with Hollywood, movie stars, entertainment, trash romantic novels for most of the past 100 years. All of our recent electronic gizmos have increased and magnified our obsession with entertainment and vicarious or second-hand reality by a 100,000 times. Twenty-four hour cable news programs have so many hours of time to fill that they fall back on junk news.I do agree that if we reach a critical mass of the number of unemployed and disgruntled Americans in dire straits, we could have an insurrection. I sincerely hope not but I would be all for peaceful marches and peaceful demonstrations.What does it say about us as a nation that one of our favorite forms of entertainment is watching people being sadistically tortured, sliced diced and murdered by the dozens. Hey, let's watch Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie murder fifteen people for breakfast in a very sophisticated, casual and humorous manner. They're killing evil scum bags, so who cares.Or let's have a ball watching young beautiful women being tortured and graphically sliced and diced by some crazed serial killer. This is what we do for entertainment on our time off!? Jupiter help us all.