Twisted

So I typed the name of the person who killed 17 people at a high school in Florida last month into Google, and I got 8 million and some hits.

I typed Arnaud Beltrame into Google and I got just under 700,000 hits. Sure, the Florida murderer has been on the news scene for longer, but Col. Beltrame is the French police officer who traded himself for one of the hostages in a Friday terror standoff in the southern part of his nation. Police cornered the gunman in a supermarket and when they heard shots, they stormed inside. Beltrame had been mortally wounded.

It seems pretty easy to blame media outlets when they pay more attention to women who claim to have had affairs with the president than they do to Congress passing a spending bill not a single member had read. We can get chapter and verse on who Pres. Trump slept with while married but we can't get anyone to devote more than a few minutes of attention to why the mokes on Capitol Hill think the country will shut down, the sky will fall and life as we know it will end if they don't spend $1.3 trillion dollars as soon as damn possible.

But the disparity in searches seems to suggest that they have an accomplice in their fascination with the facile, and that would be us. As long as we keep wanting to read and listen to the wrong thing, they'll keep spewing the wrong thing. The double-sided fascination with train wrecks -- we can't turn away and they're happy to show us more -- gave us our current president, who seems more than willing to maintain the supply of grotesquerie upon which both beasts can feed.

I seriously doubt we can fix him. But maybe we can fix us. It's just barely a start, but at least here's a couple more Google opportunities to get Arnaud Beltrame's name a little higher on the hits list.