Last night ABC News, in its continuing coverage of Decision 2004®, showed us John Kerry out bird hunting with some folks in Ohio. Four geese “paid the ultimate price,” we were told, although it’s not clear whether Kerry was the trigger man in any of the deaths.

The reason for the gandercide is that Kerry apparently feels he needs to convince “sportsmen” that he’s one of them in order to garner their votes. So here’s Kerry decked out in full camo and packing a 12-gauge (although he wasn’t about to actually be photographed carrying a dead goose, because while that might play with hunters and the NRA crowd, it might also offput soccer moms) trying to win the White House by looking macho. I mean, really, how we can trust a man to be strong on terror if he isn’t willing to shoot wild geese, right?

This is how far we’ve fallen. In a nation

• that’s mired in Iraq die to a massive foreign policy failure (a failure that, by the way, sits slap-ass in the middle of a decades-long Middle East policy context that represents arguably the most massive long-term fuck-up in American policy history);
• that’s so deep in debt the light at the top of the whole is the size of a pin-prick;
• whose economy is slowly but surely losing its ability to provide employment sufficient for people to support their families;
• where people go to the doctor not when they need to, but when they can afford to; and
• that lags behind every other developing nation on earth in educating its citizens,

goose hunting is somehow regarded as a campaign activity worthy of serious treatment by our major news institutions.

There’s a part of me that wonders if a culture like ours deserves to survive. Every time you think the press has hit rock bottom, you look around again and the bastards are still digging. There is no statement so vapid, no strategy so cynical, no lie so shameless that they will not treat it seriously.

The public is plenty to blame, as well. We seem to have a remarkable tolerance for chicanery – we can get righteously worked up over issues of principle (whether we fully understand the implications of those principles or not), and yet sometimes seem incapable of parsing even the simplest facts.

In short, I think we have become very much a feeling culture, but not much of a thinking one. Kerry is not afraid of complexity, perhaps, but television damned well is. Complexity is boring, and in a complicated world what we really need are simple answers to unfathomably difficult questions. In such an environment, a corporate media industry that makes decisions not on truth, fact, or public interest, but on pure profit, is bound to thrive at the expense of the common good. (Oh lookie, Mabel, it’s one of them yellow-bellied northeast intellectual pinko liberals we heard about on Hardball last night.)

In that context, “truth,” “facts,” “debate,” and other noble-sounding concepts are reduced to product – there’s nothing wrong with truth, per se, so long as it guarantees ratings and the highest possible shareholder return.

If Bush wins we are well and truly fucked, to be sure, but if Kerry wins it’s not a whole lot better, because the system remains. A Kerry victory treats the symptoms for a time, but in the end we still have the disease, and folks, the disease may be fatal.