Well, it happened again. I was flipping through the channels after Seinfeld and stumbled across Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. I couldn’t help myself, I paused and got caught up in Joe’s rant about how incompetent everyone was in dealing with Katrina. As I sat there, I felt my heart rate increase and my feeling of peace and contentment slipping away. My news addiction was kicking in. I moved on to Fox News, which was just one channel up. Phil Donahue was on Bill O’Reilly, discussing Cindy Sheehan, of all things. Apparently Phil’s an expert on … well, I won’t say it, but feel free to complete the thought any way you’d like. Anyway, the stupid meter was way over on red, and it was more than I could take. I took a big drink of chocolate milk, then forced myself to continue on past VH1, HGTV and a number of other channels until I was fortunate enough to find that AMC was running Tommy Boy.
I watched for as long as I could stand (about 5 minutes), but was astounded by a line by Dan Akroyd as Ray Zalinsky:
“What the American public doesn’t know is what makes them the American public, alright?”
The insightfulness of this line in an otherwise dreadful movie shocked me back into reality and saved me from becoming sucked in to the addictive world of late-night cable news. I figured the movie was all downhill from that point, and went back to do some video dubbing on my computer.
I’m so disgusted with Scarborough! All he does is rage about what the government didn’t do. I sent a pretty good chunk of money to help the relief, but he made me feel like he was blaming everybody in the country because New Orleans sat there flatfooted and waiting to get smacked by Katrina.