What's Goin' On

 Two items clogged the news cycle this past Monday. First was the announcement by the Mars Candy Company that they were eliminating their anthropomorphic spokescandies in favor of a new human celebrity, Maya Rudolph. The prevailing notion was that Mars was bowing to conservative pressure, stoked furiously by Little Tucker Carlson. Young Tuck's rage against the candy was enough to get Mars to feel the need to make this change in their marketing strategy. “In the last year, we’ve made some changes to our spokescandies. We weren’t sure if anyone would even notice. And we definitely didn’t think it would break the internet. But now we get it – even a candy’s shoes can be polarizing.” 

Keeping in mind that this is a world of buying and selling, and it was the original Clown Show Meister PT Barnum who insisted that there was no such thing as bad publicity, this will most certainly lead to some magical spikes in sales for M&Ms and ratings for the Slugworths at Faux News. I myself have found the topic worthy of my attention for far too many minutes on any given day. It's all a part of the Culture War that we keep hearing about. The war that is being fought over our candy and our gas stoves and Christmas and wearing masks during a pandemic. These are the things that we choose to pay attention to while generations of Americans are being slaughtered in real life.

California's Governor Gavin Newsom had to be pulled away from meeting with the survivors of one senseless tragedy to get a briefing on the most recent multiple homicide in his state. This one was in Half Moon Bay. Seven dead. One more critically injured. The smoke had barely cleared from Monterey City near Los Angeles before gunfire tore through the farming community in Northern California. A sixty-six year old with a work-related chip on his shoulder chose to solve his problems by killing people. In Des Moines, Iowa that same day, two students were killed and the founder of the educational mentorship program Starts Right Here was wounded by an eighteen year old with gang affiliations. This murder didn't get the press that the ones in California got because there were only two dead and one wounded. It was also moderately convenient for the media to simply drive up Interstate Five to Half Moon Bay and check out even more carnage in the Golden State. 

The problem is not M&Ms. It's not gas stoves. It's not saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. It's the horrific way in which we as a country have normalized death. Perhaps we should be grateful to Young Tuck and his minstrels, squawking about Jewish Space Lasers. They provide us a distraction from the bloody reality that is currently American Life. 

Or maybe we should care more about the American lives we lose every day.