Waiting for a flight in Detroit two days ago, I wonder why the news feed is on so loud I have difficulty concentrating and thinking. An answer comes to me as the main two items of the so-called news are about violence perpetrated by police in Chicago, with some ideological defense by one of the accused, and the FBI information that the San Bernardino murderers were radicalized before they met and married in Saudi Arabia. I say so-called news, since the discussion of these highly selected two bits is itself highly ideological. Busy passengers worried about family, money, jobs, have little chance to recover and think for themselves. Furthermore, most of the imagery and sound is meant to increase people’s anxieties and remind them it is a most complex, dangerous, necessary business to buy health, insurance, cars, drink and food, electronic devices, games. That is the real news, with the other one serving as “reality.” As Marylinne Robinson writes in the first essay on the humanities of her The givenness of things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015):

… the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. (page 4).