“Everything is under control. We just don’t know whose.”

Something is terribly wrong. I am not sure things are any worse than they always have been, but circumstances have shone a bright light on our serious, societal shortcomings. I feel terribly naive when I think to myself that it is every government’s responsibility to take care of its people. How is this idea a minority point of view, words sincerely whispered into an unruly crowd of noise and misplaced righteousness?

A number of months ago, pre-viral, I wrote a story about our country being the stuff of a Mel Brooks movie, too comical to possibly be true. He possesses a wonderfully, absurd humor, just crazy enough to almost happen, but not quite. Dark humor implies you can still manage to see through it, but today’s variety is black, pure black and the light of believability has been extinguished.

It is so easy to lay off all this lunacy on chaos, caused by stupidity, but that’s not even close. There is a terrible order to all that is happening, a predictably heinous scenario. The chorus of silence is even worse than the evil being perpetrated on us all. You know, you don’t have to be the kid in Tiananmen Square, arm wrestling a tank, to make your voice heard.

Our response to the virus has been embarrassing, which would be bad enough, but it has cost us too many lives, with more to come. If it was not obvious before, we are living under a system that is completely stacked in favor of the wealthy. We are giving our tax dollars to bolster the fortunes of the archaic oil and gas industry. Amazon will not pay a dime in taxes this year. Instead of covering all of us with Medicare during this crisis, there is legislation about to pass that will bolster the money paid to the multi-billion dollar insurance industry, keeping the unbelievably, inefficient employee based, health insurance in place.

Truthfully, Mel Brooks did come back to mind this time, because I thought about his hysterical film, Young Frankenstein. The United States is an extraordinarily powerful body, capable of being a positive force in the world. In spite of the incredibly, selfish shortcomings of our blue powdered, wig wearing, forefathers, I am positive there were many, who dreamt of a nation that embodied the best in us. In Mr. Brooks tale, he imagined what could happen if the brain of a depraved soul was planted in the body of Hercules and then blasted with far too much energy. How about he actually made love to Madeline Kahn, while she sings, “Sweet Mystery of Life”, then their twisted offspring help run the castle? Welcome to FrankenWorld, a pitch black comedy!

I did a little research, something I avoid like the plague, oh crap, no pun intended. I was curious about the origins of yellow journalism, because all of us are reading these terrible, self-serving scripts that cement us into our narrow points of view. In the late 1800’s, newspapers were fast becoming ubiquitous, a part of everybody’s daily life. Commercial media was no less competitive then than it is today. Back then, they came up with sensational crime stories, each one more salacious than the next. Eyeballs translated into dollars and they still do. I don’t think twisting facts to serve a particular constituency was the game it is today.

The Spanish Flu raced through countries right around the end of the First World War. I think print media was still adjusting to the incredible power it had and focused on spreading news of the flu. Journalism was a burgeoning art form and people were risking their lives to ferret out the truth. Those heroes are still here, although their numbers have diminished, along with their platforms.

What the hell is going on today and who can we believe? In the mid-Sixties, I had one of the coolest jobs ever for a kid. I was taking some broadcasting courses at Queens College, because they were easy and what else was a failed pre-med student to do? I got a job working the Johnson/Goldwater election of ’64 at NBC. I got coffee for Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, gods in the precocious days of broadcast journalism. Their primary competition was Walter Cronkite, the most trusted human being in the entire world. The truth mattered and all these people came out of the newspaper business, where advertising dollars were the second most important currency.

You’d think the explosion of information alternatives since the days of the Nightly News on three television networks, we would even have a better idea of exactly what is going on. When profitability and share price began to rule, pandering to eyeballs at all costs became the mantra in the media. Today, every imaginable point of view has a home and a ready-made family of like minded truth seekers, who will swear by whatever pablum they are fed.

So, ladies and gentleman, welcome to FrankenWorld. Back in Philly in the late 1700’s, that assemblage of wildly imperfect white men, had an idea in mind for a grand experiment, a republic called the United States of America. I won’t even begin to espouse how incredibly flawed this gathering was, for half the population and all people of color. However, they did create mechanisms for change and efforts have been made to fix what was broken, with much more to be done.

Today, what kind of country would you want to create? Do you think sewing division in our ranks, pitting us against each other, is the best we can do? Slavery is thriving, with people of color still chained together by prejudice and poverty, while the rest of us live under the thumb of the all powerful overlords of Frankenworld.

I know damn well we are better than that.