“That’s what the people want.”

That’s the given excuse. They used to give us news.

Now they hunt for who mis-spoke what, and who can pounce on it, and spend money to make an attack ad.

Used to be politics was about substance and real issues. The issues are still there. That’s news.

How can we forget every one of the clichés? Occasionally we hear references to “bread and circuses.” We choose to forget, or never knew, how the Roman upper Patrician class, in league with the Emperor, would throw a bone to the people, a piece of bread, and colosseum entertainment where people kill each other to cheers without television. Distracting people like a magician, filling the empty brain so there’s no room for ideas, change, social equity, a better world and a better life. Seems to have worked for millennia, still works.

They call that kind of thinking dystopian so we wouldn’t think utopian. They satisfy the appetite and glut the gut with inferior food of little nutrition, haggling over “What he meant to say…”

Meanwhile, the country, the whole world, is going hungry.