Extinguishing characteristics

My dinner companion tells me that Bernie Sanders is unelectable. He tells me that Donald Trump will implode and that Clinton, whose nomination is foregone, likely will run against Jeb Bush.

“He’s not like his brother,” my companion says. “He’s actually very smart.”

Smart is good, certainly.

I ask if it doesn’t bother him that primary coverage so far has seemed to assume that Clinton and Bush will be the nominees and has given potential deviations from that script short shrift.

“That’s how it’s always been,” he says, adding that whoever wins, it won’t make any difference anyway, so he’s content to choose between the choices given him by the powers that be.  He even concedes that mainstream media is throwing shade at Sanders, trying to shut him down, make him go away. The system at work, he says. He shrugs. What can you do?

The fact that my companion is an experienced journalist makes his complacence particularly hard to swallow. Call me a dreamer, but I expect members of the Fourth Estate to pursue, or at least want to pursue, or at least pay lip service to wanting to pursue, the truth. Pragmatic resignation flowing from that quarter bodes ill.