The Audacity of the Suspension of Reason

Perhaps I am just hopelessly cynical, clinging to quaint ideas of like reason, freedom, and the questioning of power... Perhaps I should just drink some Kool-Aid and re-watch the HBO Obama special jam-packed with bad 1980s pop… But alas, I cannot… Instead, I’m just a little disgusted by the glee Will Wilkinson observes on Inauguration Day:

It’s really just too much to take. The American media lives for politics, and so what the American public gets is completely grotesque. Selected exchange:

Meredith Viera: I think the hardest thing is not getting emotional, because it’s such an emotional morning. You just want to laugh, you want to cry. It’s so moving. It hits you that you’ll probably never see anything like this again.

Peggy Noonan (I think): I keep thinking of the old poem, the end of the old poem about the end of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it then to be alive. To be young was very heaven.” So many young people here. It’s very moving for them.

Viera: I’m not young but I’m blissful, that’s for sure.

It’s all like this. They can’t help themselves, apparently. But it’s also pretty clear that they really do see their job as mediating and engineering our emotional response, as manufacturing our consent.

That is hardly the worst of it.
I've been wondering what Ashton Kutcher thinks of this... Apparently he likes Orwell's style.