On Trump - and the media's responsibility

"We should be guard dogs, not lap dogs, and when the public sees Trump as more honest than Clinton, something has gone wrong. For my part, I’ve never met a national politician as ill informed, as deceptive, as evasive and as vacuous as Trump. He’s not normal. And somehow that is what our barks need to convey."
Nicholas Kristof

I don't often comment on politics, as it's a minefield with limited upside and limitless downside. But as the presidential campaign circus to Canada's south becomes more circus-like by the day, and as Donald Trump continues to paint the media - my profession, my landscape - as sharp-toothed villains solely responsible for his tarnished brand, I feel the need to raise my own volume a bit. If only to reflect my own responsibility to not remain silent in the face of conscious efforts to twist the public truth.

That this has gone as far as it has is a reflection of an entire country's gullibility to the kind of hucksterism I once thought was limited to old episodes of The Simpsons (monorail!) That there are enough idiots in the American electorate to turn this into a remotely close race makes me fear not for what happens the day after the election, but every day thereafter for a country whose collective intelligence isn't what we thought it was.

For the agenda of the country that brought us moon missions and science-fiction medical advancements to be hijacked by rubes and baskets of deplorables who vote with all the insight of a drunk armadillo is beyond tragic. Long after Donald Trump either wins or loses, America will still be filled with a lot more toxic, ill-informed thinking and barely-capable thinkers than I ever thought possible.

If ever there was a time for the media to consolidate its strengths for the very future of the society it covers - and for us to defend its integrity in the face of the rising political-moronic wave that threatens to erode its legitimacy - now is it.