My 2022 Trip to Europe (iv): Denying Political Intrustions Into Friendship

June 4 -- I woke up Saturday morning on the air mattress and was psyched for the day. As each night before, I had barely gotten any true sleep. I kept waking up every hour or so, and unable to sleep much further. The jet lag was extending my misery. I wanted a good full night's sleep very badly but it was being denied to me by my body's slowness to adapt. 

Nevertheless I brightened up with the full sun and was glad Okki wanted to linger a bit. We made breakfast. Okki used Alexa to bring up the news. He gets all his news this way primarily from two sources BBC and NPR. During our contentious conversation on the patio two nights prior, I'd told him, in response to a question, how much I despise those particular news sources, but I wasn't surprised he still played them. It's a difference between our side and their side: they can't help telling us and showing us "how it's done" with the news (i.e. how I'm supposed to listen to it, from the correct sources, and how I'm supposed to process it). The short NPR snippet he played lived up to every expectation. It was clear it was all about making suburban women swoon with anxiety over the latest gun tragedy, to gin up support for the Democratic Party, for which NPR was a straightforward party organ.

They even went further, by having their second morning story be about how a couple school teachers in upstate New York (Rochester, I think) sent mean tweets to their students, and were reprimanded. I almost busted out laughing, but I listened placidly for the sake of my gracious host. If he needed to tell me what his news sources were, then I would politely listen, and comment only later, at his invitation. 

For NPR to care about such a minor incident, there had to be an aspect of the story that allowed the listener to make a tsk-tsk value judgment about White working-class conservative people in the heartland (which includes upstate and western New York at this point). It had to further the narrative of Critical Race Theory, or the something about LGBTQ. I didn't pay attention long enough to hear which ones. It would only have enraged me privately to have to listen to the agenda being shoved into people so hard.

The two of us had better things to do than discuss political differences. We had a full day planned. First on the agenda was to drive into Geneva, and visit the giant particle collider facility at CERN.