My sincere hope is that I’m about to indulge in a bunch of vitriolic rumor-mongering. I don’t want this to be real.
Last night my husband said Addie Polk, about whom I wrote a blog entry, has died. He heard it yesterday from a co-worker, who got it from the local newspaper.
It isn’t just Addie Polk’s death that has me faunching this morning. That would be enough to depress me, but not to throw me into back spasms, a migraine, and stroke level blood pressure. If you believe in fairy tales and the cleanliness of large American news outlets, step away from the blog.
I went to CNN.com a few minutes ago and did a search on “Addie Polk” to confirm her death. CNN didn’t return any results on my search. Which is ludicrous. So I searched again. The second time CNN labeled my search on “Addie Polk”…wait for it… an “invalid search.” Okay.
So I went to the second return on my original Google search on “Addie Polk” which was UPI. Guess what. UPI doesn’t know anything about Addie’s death either.
Soooo, I went back to Google and tried, “‘Addie Polk’ AND ‘dead’.” Still no joy from big news outlets.
I’m so frickin’ enraged right now that Google, CNN and UPI never heard of Addie Polk after her home was signed back over to her that I can’t even think straight.
I hope this whole burying of info about Addie Polk’s current physical condition, to wipe her tragedy from the public mind, is some sort of internet anomaly. I hope I’ll find a link to deny or confirm her death. I hope I’ll have to make a public apology later today.
You know what? I don’t much care if every little paper in BFE has a story on Addie’s death. I care enormously that the big media outlets, which milked her story for the “heartwarming” angle of her house being signed back over to her because she attempted suicide, don’t have the integrity to buck the “bad publicity” aspect of her death because it reflects negatively on Countrywide, Bank of America and Fannie Mae.
I’m cynical enough to think they, the powers that be, were only too happy to substitute Addie’s story with the Rajaram murder/suicide story. How is that cynical on my part? Because we can all say, “Karthik Rajaram was a bad man to kill his family and himself just because his home was foreclosed.” And I cynically think that’s what the media prefers to keep us focused on…people we can demonize, blame and feel morally superior to.
We can blame Karthik Rajaram for all sorts of weaknesses that we’re so darned sure we wouldn’t have if we were in his shoes. What he did was so wrong that we all “know” we couldn’t do such a thing. We can blame a single man, not a predatory industry that could take any one of us down next.
But who among us can blame the 90 year old widow who loses her home? Who among us can be so certain that we might not make the same choice Addie Polk made? How can we read about Addie Polk and not see the line of responsibility stretching from Countrywide to Bank of America to Fannie Mae, that ends up at the responsibility of everyone who voted to bail out the greediest among us?
Just in case anyone doesn’t see the common thread running through my recent posts, it’s corporate greed. From Apple refusing to honor the AppleCare I paid for because my PowerBook lived under the same roof as a smoker, all the way to CNN’s eventual “burying” of Addie Polk’s story, it’s all about the greed of corporations preying on us for profit, and the mainstream media who covers up for them.
And our role is to buy, buy, buy; believe, believe, believe; then pay taxes, pay taxes, pay taxes.
Now I’m going to go add the tag “greed” to my blog posts which deal with greed. I think I’m having a long overdue epiphany, and seeing clearly what it is that’s been pissing me off for a long time.
