Someone should start a website, because it turns out our “mainstream” British media made up and reported a story that Pope Francis told a boy with a dead dog that his dog would go to heaven.
Just. Made. Up.
It turns out Paul VI did have an encounter like that, and if we can believe what the media reported at the time, said something similar.
But. Not. Pope. Francis.
I post this because it points to our new postmodern difficulty with establishing not just moral truth, but simple facts. The media is our reality.
This is what the Ferguson protesters know: It doesn’t matter what really happened at Ferguson, what matters is a media narrative has been created.
And one even conservatives aren’t doing very much to combat. Libertarians and the libertarianish conservatives appear to prefer the anti-government, anti-police narrative, too.
This is just interesting, stepping back and looking at what happens.
In my youth, what we now call “social conservatism” was actually at first “law-and-order conservatism,” a reaction to the social upheaval that appeared to threaten the social order.
Is that social order now simply gone?
We have a contest among culture creators between those who want to use the police-corruption narrative to challenge government and those who want to use it to expand federal government’s equality-imposing reach.
But the idea of law and order? Not so much.