SOTU

I once read a story by Ray Bradbury about an American couple driving through Central America trying to get back to what remained of the USA after the big one went down. One of the men they meet told them of his life. When young and living in the city he read the newspaper every day, and was always worried and angry. When he lived in the countryside, the newspapers he got were a week, two weeks old; and now he read them much more calmly. He urged the couple to let news age to rid it of useless urgency.

I've been trying to remember the last State of the Union address I listened to--and I can't. All I can recall is how often it was interrupted for applause. I'm content to read it in the paper the next day--if I even bother to read the whole thing. I already have a pretty fair notion of what's going on in the country: things that make the news and trends that don't get reported. The president's proposals are going to be elaborated elsewhere, and since the devil is in the details those are the descriptions that matter. And when experience shows that the speech is likely to invoke fraudulent statistics like the "number of jobs saved" I feel even less need to pay attention.

Let it age--a cabinet needs mending and the laundry needs sorting.