And all the news just repeats itself Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen

I was sleepin’ like a rat
When I heard something jerkin’
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this movie before!”
-- Motorpsycho Nightmare

So my dear friend asks me as dear friends often do, "What's new today?" Coming first thing in the morning this is code for "what highly predictable if specifically unknowable pieces of shit have happened in the world overnight?"

Well, everything is "news" and yet nothing is new. Thinking the news is new is a fatal affliction of the modern mind.

Examples:

• This year's volcano crisis yields half-ashed policies in Europe:Europe in wrangle over airspace closure rules - Yahoo! News New airspace closure rules decided after last year's Icelandic volcanic eruption have caused divisions in Europe on how to decide whether airlines can fly near the ash cloud.
• Elsewhere, someone or something is trying to knock off a very evil man but, alas, missing as usual: Blast hits Iran refinery as Ahmadinejad visits
• The Supremes say 'Let 40,000 felons bloom!" Just not in their town which has quite enough felons already, thank you. California inmates: Supreme Court orders California to release inmates - latimes.com
• Al Gore is still peddling his jars of flatulence labeled "free candy" to our children: Al Gore addresses Hamilton grads Al Gore, 45th vice president of the U.S., Nobel Laureate and author of An Inconvenient Truth, told Hamilton’s Class of 2011 that the climate crisis is “the most serious challenge that our civilization has ever faced...”
• Two autofellationist dwarfs try to become giants by thinking they are Reagan and Thatcher: Obama, Cameron liken 'Arab spring' to Cold War - The Oval: Tracking the Obama presidency
• "Rules? In a knife fight?" Key Internet summit to discuss online rules
• Football mouthbreather warns that the circuses must continue lest the masses riot: Ravens star Ray Lewis issues a stern warning. He says if there is no football, crime will increase across the country. -- CBS Baltimore
• Meanwhile the usual suspects (also known as "Unruly teens" because no other description is allowed) continue to committ crimes without consequences at the fast-food target of the day: YouTube - Unruly Teens wrecking a Dunkin Donuts at 75 christopher street in manhattan
• And it is comforting for Joplin residents to know that, unlike Bush and Katrina, Obama cares so deeply about them he'll try to get there by Sunday: "All we can do is let them know that all of America cares deeply about them and that we are going to do absolutely everything we can to make sure that they recover..." -- Searchers and dogs scour Missouri tornado wreckage - Yahoo! News

So that's the news on the third rock from the sun. As that geezer Walter Cronkite used to say, "And that's the way it is."

We forget, of course, that "the way it is" is pretty much always the way it is. We just know about it more quickly and in more detail via, as my friends say, "the internet machine." It's so fast, so omnipresent, and so subject to "decisions and revisions which a minute can reverse" that at internet speeds all you can hear is the fall of a botched civilization.

Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more,
She sits and stares through the back door screen.
And all the news just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen.
Someday I'll go and call up Rudy,
We worked together at the factory.
But what could I say if asks "What's new?"
"Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do."

Posted by Vanderleun at May 24, 2011 8:50 AM