So, it is the future. I know that the changing of a date is nominal, yet it is still important for me. I spend a lot of time thinking about my country, both researching it and investigating it, and I have noticed a few things that point from Pony, Montana, to the 1912 US Presidential Election right up to the present, and these things stay on my mind because I find them very relevant to my life. Some of these ideas I have researched enough that I can support, others are notions. Here is some of my notions:
The US Press is still, as it ever was, fond of narratives and not always willing to look at the entire picture, especially in day to day reporting. The more I study America, quantitatively and qualitatively, the more I find its hard to sum up major trends, let alone exceptions and countercurrents. When Barack Obama was running for president, there was many charges that the press was overly friendly to him. I think these charges were true, but I don't think it was due to politics as much as it was due to the fact that Obama had a good narrative: a relatively young man, the first African-American, running for president! There was no way to shape that narrative towards failure. Of course, no American president ever manages to really impress more than 60% of the electorate, and Obama was no exception. There were pockets of anger and hatred towards him all along. Then, in 2009, with Obama actually in office, the press needed a new narrative, and suddenly discovered that there were lots of people: predominantly white and rural, that were never too fond of him to begin with. Suddenly the narrative switches to the idea of some great populist backlash against Obama. And again, this wasn't because the press either had it in for Obama, or there was actually any more discontent against him than there is for any president. It is because the press needed a narrative, and the future, as a narrative, had grown old. The past, represented by all those people in middling-rural and suburban area who knew about American history from the cowboy movies of the 50s, was the story of the year.
The problem with the past as a story is it gets old quicker than the future as a story. After a year of the narrative being focused on people's reaction against the urbanization and change of America, there isn't much to be said for it. Most likely, the press will find a new narrative, probably equally unbalanced, with some haste.