* Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, given the unconscionably polarized political climate that President Obama inherited. But, still, there was no defensible reason for the mainstream media to have acquiesced and, in effect, reinforced deplorable partisanship by adopting “Obamacare” as its short-hand for the Affordable Care Act. Headline- and talking-points convenience is not a good enough reason for accommodating Republican demonization of the president via its relabeling of the ACA.
Now “Obamacare” is institutionalized as an eponymous Republican target and rallying point. Call it an “Obamination.”
* Speaking of media laziness and cluelessness, it works both ways. I was told by a local network affiliate anchor that management had to rein in careless, on-camera references to Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Because his name was foreign-sounding, some news readers were referring to the candidate as “Barack” on second reference. And given that their politics were likely on the left-hand side of the spectrum, it only reinforced certain characterizations of the mainstream media.
* To the surprise of no one who was privy to the deplorable dynamics of America’s presidential election, the Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its 2016 “word of the year.” It’s defined as a state “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Actually, “post-truth” is a euphemistic upgrade for “fake news” for the gullible.
* One quick takeaway from the Golden Globes Awards: If we must have someone playing the role of president, too bad it can’t be Meryl Streep. And, yeah, Trump still got off easy.
* Maybe local media will experience, well, an epiphany some day and no longer consider the Tarpon Springs Epiphany celebration as worthy of a big page-one, above-the-fold splash and top-of-the-newscast coverage.
* Living languages are always changing. Back in the day, stuff we liked was “cool,” which had nothing to do with temperature. Today, it’s “awesome,” which typically has nothing to do with awe. “You know” interjections morph into “like” faux analogies. “Notoriety” now looks nothing like the noun version of notorious. It’s what languages and their contemporary speakers do over the course of generational and cultural changes.
But here’s one that still sounds weirdly stilted: when authorities report that someone who is unaccounted for “goes missing” or “went missing.” I can envision former English teachers wincing at that verbal hybrid. But now we have “went disappeared” as well. Would that it went, like, missing.
* Here we go again: Another reminder of not being in post-racial America is the periodic incidence of controversies erupting over the teaching of “To Kill a Mockingbird ” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the most recent case, it was a Virginia school district, where the books were banned from classrooms and libraries. A committee, of course, has been appointed to see if the bans should be permanent.
An obvious question is begged. Doesn’t context matter?
Why not make this a non-clichéd, teachable moment–not just in classic American literature but in contemporary societal maturity? How ironically hypocritical that we have to tolerate routine racist and sexist references in our pop culture, but we still draw a politically correct line at one complaining parent about American classics that have so much to teach. Is “N-Word Jim” the answer?