In the intro­duc­tion to his huge­ly pop­u­lar 1950s radio series “This I Believe”, CBS News broad­cast­er Edward R Mur­row said:“We hard­ly need to be remind­ed that we are liv­ing in an age of con­fu­sion - a lot of us have trad­ed in our beliefs for bit­ter­ness and cyn­i­cism or for a heavy pack­age of despair or even a quiv­er­ing por­tion of hys­te­ria. Opin­ions can be picked up cheap­ly in the mar­ket place while such com­modi­ties as courage and for­ti­tude and faith are in alarm­ing­ly short supply.”

The para­graph neat­ly sums up why 2024 may turn out to be a per­fect fit for the French expres­sion “plus ca change”, which is short for the expres­sion “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
On the face of it, that such sen­ti­ment should pre­vail in 2024 is not sur­pris­ing, giv­en that an assess­ment by the Inter­na­tion­al Cri­sis Group warned the year “…begins with wars burn­ing in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine and peace­mak­ing in cri­sis. World­wide, diplo­mat­ic efforts to end fight­ing are fail­ing. More lead­ers are pur­su­ing their ends mil­i­tar­i­ly. More believe they can get away with it.”
The good news is that 2024 also gives the world the best shot it’s had in a long time to counter that gloomy real­i­ty. In the next twelve months and  to vary­ing degrees, vot­ers in more than 50 coun­tries will get the chance to say how and by whom they wish to be led. The caveat – and isn’t there always one?  – is that while democ­ra­cy was intend­ed to  make us mas­ters of our fate, we tend to “get what we pay for” in the form of who we elect. That’s in part because unless we pay atten­tion, the advan­tage is with those inside the system.
The pre­ferred tac­tic of the most dis­com­fit­ing (to be kind) of today’s politi­cians and their han­dlers is to insult intel­li­gence by dis­cred­it­ing real­i­ty to the point where the elec­torate accepts dis­or­der as the norm.
Elec­tion­eer­ing speech­es, slo­gans and talk­ing points are tai­lored more to what office-seek­ers believe their base and par­ty sup­port­ers want to hear and will buy, than to what needs, can or ought to be delivered.
Work­ing out whether a politi­cian has more than a nod­ding acquain­tance with truth, core-beliefs or prin­ci­ples, requires con­cern for the truth and the future.
Don­ald Trump’s lead in the polls (if they are to be believed) indi­cates nei­ther of those mat­ter to far too many. He has told tens of thou­sand of fact-checked lies, yet his sup­port­ers are will­ing to ignore them all. In spite of tele­vised hear­ings, audits and inquiries that found no evi­dence of fraud in the 2020 U.S. elec­tions, “more Amer­i­cans ques­tion Biden’s vic­to­ry than they did two years ago.”

                             THEY ARE NOT ALONE

An unwill­ing­ness, or inabil­i­ty to under­stand the point of 19^th cen­tu­ry French author Ana­tole France’s obser­va­tion that “If fifty mil­lion peo­ple say a fool­ish thing, it is still a fool­ish thing” isn’t lim­it­ed to the Amer­i­can public.
As much as I hold more than a few aspi­rants to pow­er in con­tempt, one has to admit that giv­en their attrib­ut­es, it took them a lot of effort to rise to the very pin­na­cle of mediocrity.
For­mer British Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son was able to bal­ance aca­d­e­m­ic bril­liance and bone-head­ed buf­foon­ery with­out tip­ping the scales into any­thing use­ful either way.
Incum­bent PM Rishi Sunak and a good num­ber of his cab­i­net have con­trived to use a first class edu­ca­tion (near­ly half of them are grad­u­ates of either Oxford or Cam­bridge) in such a way that no one would ever guess they attend­ed the school of life, nev­er mind revered insti­tu­tions of learning.
The rank and file of leg­isla­tive bod­ies have in the main mea­sured up just as bad­ly. An essen­tial for good gov­er­nance is an abil­i­ty to find and nav­i­gate the mid­dle ground, not pro for­ma dis­missal of dif­fer­ing ideas. Instead, the New York Times “Opin­ion Video” con­clud­ed: “Sopho­moric insults. Rude­ness. Per­son­al attacks. Cross talk. These have become defin­ing fea­tures of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal debates these days.”
The descrip­tion will be famil­iar to any­one who has observed par­lia­men­tary “debate” elsewhere.
How much bet­ter a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem and the pop­u­lace it is sup­posed to serve would be if more “ser­vants of the peo­ple” were hum­ble and smart enough to be guid­ed by this piece of wis­dom from the late U.S. Pres­i­dent Har­ry S. Tru­man” “It is amaz­ing what you can accom­plish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
The essays broad­cast on Murrow’s pro­gramme, which at its peak drew some 39-mil­lion lis­ten­ers (the equiv­a­lent of 85-mil­lion in today’s U.S. pop­u­la­tion) con­clud­ed“.. by offer­ing inspi­ra­tion and hope for a trou­bling and wor­ri­some peri­od in time…”
They were broad­cast with­out adver­tis­ing. Tran­scripts were offered to local news­pa­per for free.
It’s a con­cept that would require a seri­ous leap of faith on the part of main­stream media. But  then, 2024 is a “Leap Year”, and it sure as hell could use a Mur­row-like broad­cast or two.
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