How about waiting until after the people vote? Then there will be an actual story worth reporting.

The overcoverage of Iowa has become sickening. It’s all the news media are talking about. It’s no exaggeration to say that politics—or, more precisely, the frenzied anticipation of election results before the election has occurred—has become a kind of modern religion, manically filling the cosmos with its polls and predictions. In the old Hegelianism, leftist intellectuals constructed a secular substitute for transcendence by foretelling the unfolding shape of the Spirit in History. In our pop Hegelianism, the mass media construct a secular substitute for transcendence by predicting the winner of the Iowa caucuses. In both cases, men seek, though the act of pretended intellectual control over the world, to replace the psychological function once fulfilled by their relationship with God.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2012 08:24 AM | Send