A Slogan

There was plenty of silliness in politics last week.  We had an irrelevant  televised  shouting match between an ill-tempered  woman  or two and one of Trump’s sons  being treated by people in the media as not merely newsworthy, but important.  We had Michael Bloomberg deciding that - since as Manhattan goes, so goes the nation -  he  can be elected president, and a bunch of Manhattan-based lefties in the media seeming to take it seriously.  There were the usual antics from Trump and his enemies in Washington. However my choice for the week’s topper was Elizabeth Warren out there striving singlehandedly to revive people’s belief in the old canard that girls can’t handle math or arithmetic.

There were also things  that, while apparently silly, were actually serious business.  One of these was the way jokes and pictures using the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” slogan (or variations on it) popped up all over the internet and the country.  (Some of the stuff was pretty good. My favorites were a picture of Hillary Clinton holding up a T shirt with the slogan on it and a note explaining that “Kilroy was here” was an earlier generation’s version of “Epstein didn’t kill himself”.)  It is serious because it is more evidence of something our civil masters and their public relations agents in the traditional media should be worried about, and libertarians   pleased by.  More  people are coming to the conclusion that there may be no reason to accept uncritically the official story or version of anything connected to politics, irrespective of how uniformly people in the traditional media push it. This makes people harder to scare and boss around and makes all sorts of logrolling including the game of creating and selling crises much more difficult. I don’t think there is as much skepticism as in the late seventies, but we may be getting there. I hope we do. The skepticism is healthy and well justified.