| Left or Reverse |
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Reading may be hard, speaking may be hard, writing may be hard, ladies and gentlemen, but thinking is a great deal harder still, and there's nobody to coach you in your efforts. Someone or other may say, gosh, that's an original train of thought, but they will only do so when you have actually said something or written it down, and those are words not thoughts. Thoughts have much more content, are much more lateral, have much greater depth and impassiveness than the spoken or written word. I think I can elaborate on the above, although it's just possible that it could be a language-specific thing: do any of you happen to know whether they tend to confuse left and right in other languages as much as they do here? I would for the time being suggest that you take my words as local news coverage, so as to understand what I was getting at when I wrote down the first paragraph. But let's leave this for now. My own concern is that I have been trying really hard over the past months to refrain from giving political comments. I invariably end up regretting such efforts, and so I have to find a way to compensate for what I've gone without. Certain conditions apply. A text may cover a handful of sentences at the outside, where appropriate by way of a footnote or quote. An enigmatic photograph is also acceptable, although here too the caption should be succinct. Here goes nothing: Irrespective of my disapproval or approval of events having unfolded, it struck me that the news coverage has in general been resembling a marital spat more than it has the impartial collection of news, to the point where I'd be tempted to qualify it as reactionary in that the conservatism of our independent information providers has seemed to blind them to impending change. However, it is the sound of the word "reactionary" that I dislike, apart from their underlying, largely left-wing perspective. Which enabled me to resign to the following qualification: the currently prevailing trend in Dutch journalism is one of leftionariness. |