Concurrence

Atrios:

HBO's showing their dramatization of the 2000 post-election fiasco this evening. They were kind enough to send me a screener, but ultimately I just couldn't watch it. I even kept turning off CNN today when they were showing clips.

That whole saga was just really traumatic. It was my "holy shit everything is really screwed up" moment when I suddenly realized that all of our elites - politicians, supremos, and especially the media - did not deserve the modest naive faith that I had given them. I'm not saying that I lacked any cynicism about the various institutions before, but just watching the media piss on our Democracy over that time period was incredibly jarring.

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me. It was a little more stretched out than that, taking place from roughly November 2000 to the summer of 2002, but my normal cynical attitude towards humanity felt like it turned to sheer terror for a few years there at the possibility that all the horrendous shit I was reading about was really happening and that the national media - the gatekeepers, the professionals, the (supposedly) sane ones - were practically leading the charge off the cliff.

Almost seven years later, having been proven largely right (which is not a good thing when you're a one-stop Doom 'n Gloom Shop), I'm a little amazed I'm not a black pit of cynicism. Or insane.

Stare too long into the abyss and all that.