The chattering class

The phrase" chattering class" originated I believe in England. It described a certain segment of the educated privileged upper middle and upper-class. They would have endless dinner parties and cocktail parties where they would stand around in exchange insightful comments on the issues of the day. But, they would never get their hands dirty and actually put their insights into action. There was nothing but endless, repetitive chatter.

We now have our own chattering class in this country. It is the endless, fungible hosts and panelists on our news networks. These people gathere daily, hour after hour and endlessly chatter about the newest tidbit of information, or finding nothing new rehash yesterday's. For instance, if it is learned that Donald Trump had a cheeseburger for breakfast that would be a topic. After the host  announced that Donald Trump had a cheeseburger for breakfast he or she would immediately turn to the panel. One of these panelists would immediately launch into analysis of whether that meant that Donald Trump was announcing a new protective trade policy by demonstrating we grow all our own food. Another what interject that it had to do with Trump making an anti-environmentalist statement showing that he was unconcerned about the amount of crops and rangeland it took two grow beef compared to grains and vegetables. Someone else would want to discuss small businesses that make hamburgers and the like. Then they would bat it around back-and-forth. Perhaps they would then move onto some other similarly crucial issue. such as Twitter accounts.

My point is that because they have so much time to fill there doesn't seem to be any hierarchy of importance of issues. Nor is there a conclusion. Instead there is just the republican surrogates or operatives exchanging with the democrat surrogates or operatives, endlessly. Years ago in discussing how the general population of Germany in the 1930s could live with what they knew was going on, Hannah Arent coined the phrase the banality of evil. We are now in a period of the banality of political discussion. All comments, no matter how silly or superficial seem to be given equal credibility. There doesn't seem to be much breakdown in the artificial politeness of this nonsense.  The phrase" that is total nonsense" doesn't crop up much. From what I understand, if you want totally one sided comments the place to go is talk radio but the people who listen are already totally committed to the truth of what's being said. So, confirmation bias rules the day. According to a poll, 73% of the population thinks that Donald Trump is a liar but far higher numbers either approve of him or think he is doing a decent job. This suggests to me that all of this network news chatter is completely useless, Accomplishing nothing. Just tell us what happened. We can figure it out.