Americans love train wrecks. It's the reason we invented trains. And automobiles. And flying machines. While the last three statements are debatable, no one can argue with the first one.
So it's no wonder that when someone decided to start a cable channel specializing in disasters twenty four hours a day, we Americans would go for it like ants to a watermelon. The day a CNN anchor did a live remote from under his bed in a Baghdad hotel room as Patriot missiles whizzed by, things changed.
Soon, a sly strategist with the Republican party took the idea one step further. Why don't we have a channel showing nothing but train wrecks that blames the wrecks on the other side? Why indeed? As quickly as you can say "naturalized citizen" old Rupert buys into the idea and soon Fox News is the ultimate distributor of train wreck America.
The great communicator himself made it possible. Ronnie Raygun changed FCC laws for media ownership and set aside the Fairness Doctrine. That rule, in place since the early days of radio, kept stations from being propoganda machines for a particular entity. It kept broadcast news organizations honest and ensured the reported information was somewhat accurate.
Sadly, half of living Americans have no memory of America before train wreck TV, aka cable news. Their whole lives have been blessed with a stream of vitriolic nonsense delivered by over-fed talking jerks on the tv and radio. We have a special name for these overbaked blowhards but I can't use it. I'd like to, believe me. But I can't, this is a family paper. So we'll just refer to them as basspoles.
America fell for the biggest basspoles in the country wrecking every train coming down the track. Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity. They were the kind of jerks every one wanted to beat up on the playground back in junior high. Smug, self-absorbed, lazy cretins who would steal a kid's lunch money and blame it on the poor kid, or the weak kid, or the different kid. On South Park they call him Cartman. And that my friends, bring us to one Donald Trump.
It's pretty easy to see what the Republican strategy over the last 30 years would lead to. If you keep appealing to your base's most base instincts with a nudge and a wink, one day those instincts will bite you. One day all that hatred and prejudice and ignorance and greed that you've stirred up will pile up into a candidate that is the Donald: the ultimate alpha basspole.
Like Dr. Frankenstein, Fox News exclaimed "It's Alive, It's Alive" in 2010 with the birth of the tea party. But now in 2015, Frankenstein's monster is preening on the parapet inciting the peasants to light the castle and Fox is trying to shoot him down before the smoke becomes an inferno.
It might be too late. The train wreck is in progress. There's a piece of the voting public who believe the Donald will come in and fire all of America's problems. The more he insults, boasts, and lies, the more the confused come running.
America loves train wrecks. There's one going on before our eyes and it's the kind of entertainment Shakespeare dreamed about. One hopes the only casualty is a political party, not our country.