Barking Dogs and Cable News

Have you ever noticed how happy dogs are when they are barking at the window when the mailman or another dog goes by. The mailman, he comes every single day, and yet the dog goes into a barking fugue and cannot be silenced. You yell. You punish. The dog may quiet down with serious intervention, but by then the intruder is usually in retreat, and the dog is wearing an expression of supreme satisfaction.

In a household with many dogs, all it takes is one dog to start and then the others throw themselves into the fray with a murderous abandon. It's so...animal in its intensity and one doesn't want that in one's house.

Until one turns on the TV and starts watching cable news. It seems that the popularity of cable news is that it provides the thrill of the pack attack. It doesn't have to be any more real than the threat posed to the dogs by the mailman. It's just so much fun to be going at it in faux tooth and nail. Life has meaning. I am SAVING THE WORLD. Gosh it feels good.

People put up with the barking dogs because households with dogs are much less likely to be robbed. A dog barking is not always a false response. Sometimes it can save property or lives. So, to continue the analogy, I do not want to say all fighting for justice and against evil is a substitute for facing reality. Sometimes it is all too real.

But when you have these well-to-do commentators on TV acting and speaking with righteous anger way out of proportion to the threat, whipping up frenzy over every real or imagined attack, it is false and does a disservice to the human spirit. It calls up our animal response and throws us into irrational rages that are never allowed to die quietly for the "mailman" never goes away. As he's leaving the porch, the UPS man is arriving, and then the FEDEX guy, and our barking is encouraged 24-7 until we have been driven mad with phantoms. If a real burglar did come along, our ability to recognize him would be compromised and we'd be too worn out to do much in the way of defense.