Pissing on the Proverbial Bonfire

News. Isn’t news great? All that stuff that’s happening out there, stuff you don’t really care about much but feel that you probably should. All the stuff that, were you to really think about it, would probably enrage and depress you in equally torturous measures. Thank God there’s so dam much of it that it’s almost impossible to think about any one suicide-provoking event for more than a few second before an equally preposterous and dismal state of affairs becomes apparent to you. Yup. Thank God for news, because without our daily injection of the horrors of the world we might actually care about things. But we don’t. We’re inoculated. We’re immune.

But it does have other uses of course. Good uses. Important uses. The kinds of uses that make our dreary day-to-day shudder of an existence feel somehow more important. Because we get to talk about the news like real, proper, important, genuine adults.

‘What about that situation in (insert poor, downtrodden, shat-on-by-the-western-world country here), isn’t it just awful?’ we say, making our ‘earnest’ eyes.

‘Oh yes, just terrible. Terrible! And those poor children!’ we exclaim, with our serious-yet-filled-with-empathy voice. And aren’t we just bloody brilliant for discussing this?

Of course we are. Well, maybe. I’m being facetious of course, it is, after all, better to be aware than not. Especially when the most important usage of keeping up to date with the news comes to pass. Debate. Ah glorious debate! I may not be allowed to beat the crap out of you, good sir, but I can sure as hell piss on your proverbial bonfire and beat your flaccid point of view into submission. And hopefully there’ll be a lovely looking lady watching us whilst I do it too. Intellectual fisticuffs. The wet dream of every man God saw fit to make a pacifist by physique.

Of course debate it 10% knowledge, 20% cocksureness, and 70% absolute fucking bullshit. The last two I am pretty well versed in, and for everything else, there are the opinion sections. Oh heavenly opinion sections! Where would I be without you? In a sea of objectivism, floating aimlessly in my dingy of doubt, underneath the clouds of agnosticism. I would never make up my mind about anything if it weren’t for other people doing it for me. Of course I make up my mind about what kind of a mind I want to be made up for me, and purchase the newspaper that best defines me as a person. I personally enjoy being a smug, wishy-washy liberal who wishes the world would simply hold hands and sing. This, and my profound sense of miserable confusion when it comes to comprehending capitalist economics, leads me to buy liberal broadsheets. Left wing, well, lets face it, propaganda (what news isn’t?) or, if you happen to be an American, and haven’t yet figured out that McCarthy was a paranoid, politically insane, megalomaniac, I might be branded as a ‘Commy’, or something of the sorts. I’m not. Well, not in the ‘state soap and shampoo’ sense of the word anyway. People need a selection of facial creams to pamper themselves with, after all.

No. But I do inevitably flick to the opinions section of my newspaper of choice in order to have my next debate there, all written down for me, with all of the tendentious facts and figures spread out in fantastically convenient written form of my next argument. So I can add my 20% cocksureness and my 70% bollocks to my newly found 10% knowledge. I could read the actual paper, or course, but what would be the point? I’d just be in my metaphorical ocean again, and I need to piss on your bonfire and shit on your lawn. Proverbially, of course. Unless vodka is involved..