Good versus Evil is no longer a valid question. It didn’t have to be cancelled-out, but when you give people an inch, they always take it all and ask for more. We have so many issues that need work, yet we keep our eyes on the Twitter-feed, or, if you’re older, the CNN feed.

But now that Professional News has gone pro, and very demonstrably become devoted to its sponsors’ agenda(s) more than its former motivation: that of informing the public, we should all stop watching the news. If your well gets poisoned, do you keep drinking because there’s no other well? Or do you focus on digging a new well?

Katrina in New Orleans, the Exploding Gulf Drilling Platform, the (non-) appointment of over a hundred important Federal posts, all these things are presented to us as political issues—but they are not political issues—at heart, they are threats to our entire civilization, or at least pieces of it. The news presents these things (and pretty much everything else) as controversy—that gives it more drama and gets more viewers. But the rules of their game say they shouldn’t get involved. What could be more suggestive than framing every piece of information in the form of a “Survival” episode?

We find ourselves in a Bizarro-world, wherein the delineation between Good and Evil can be clearly discerned—but is not pertinent! We know that pollution is Evil—we’d like to clean it up, but there are others ‘factors in play’—our air and water are being poisoned, but that’s not the real problem?! War is Evil—we should always avoid killing each other wherever the opportunity arises—we’d love to bring our soldiers home, but there are others ‘factors in play’. The twisted state of our Public School systems is another Evil—but, you guessed it, improving the schools isn’t the ‘real problem’.

I watched TV today and heard about this Pundit-Lady saying Mrs. Romney “never had a job in her life”, which elicited a firestorm of denial, saying that raising kids and managing the home as a Stay-At-Home-Mom is most certainly a ‘job’, and an important and very difficult job, at that.

I politely disagree in the name of clarity of semantics. Moms do work harder than anyone else at any other job. The sheer, incessant stress of it would hospitalize most grown men, and spoiled teen-agers to boot. But I must insist they are working (harder, yes—and longer hours, yes) but they are not holding a job. Child-rearing is a tough experience—but it has a great deal of positive feedback and love as its result.

Whereas, ‘holding a job’ is about as opposite from good, honest work as a person can be. It involves envy, spitefulness, rumor-mongering, and competition so bitter and inhuman that a job-holder can sometimes be driven to either homicide or suicide—or both. ‘Holding a job’ is about not telling your boss what you really think of her or him. It’s about being forced to work late because your manager held back a job until late afternoon, then left at five on the dot—like always.

A job is a thing with acid-tipped talons that insistently digs into your mind every morning, telling you that break-time (call it ‘being home’ all you want—it’s still a break) is over and it’s time to rush back to your cubicle or cash register. It draws blood before lunch, when you can’t meet a deadline because you’re stuck in an endless meeting about ‘nothing to do with you’. It scrapes at you during the noon break, echoing the morning’s brushfires in your mind while it clock-watches the fleeting 30 minutes of lunch-time, and ponders the many things-undone awaiting you when those precious seconds have run out.

I can remember a time when it wasn’t like this—when a lunch was a PAID full-hour, when people could skip meetings they had no connection with, when working steadily was rewarded with steady work. Remember? When Xmas office parties weren’t paid for by employee donations, and not held in the conference room, but in a nice restaurant or bar.

I think the end began in the nineteen-eighties—Japan was the big winner that decade, their cars outsold ours—in our own country. Their economy seemed to soar while ours was definitely drooping. And suddenly, much was being made of the Japanese management methods. No one seemed to notice that the Japanese worked harder because they were used to being in thrall to the big Japanese Corp./Govt. Combines. No one mentioned that the Americans worked slower because they were unused to their employers treating them like slaves.

So one thing lead to another, and now it’s China being used as an excuse to degrade the dignity of a day’s work—the process of erasing our sense of self-worth at the workplace has made great strides. And then we go home, sit down in front of the flashing lights and pretty music and weather reports. And the TV is right in tune with this new America—they put stuff on the box now that would have been laughed at (and not in a good way) back in the sixties and seventies.

Right—jobs vs. work—I get sidetracked when ‘work’ and/or ‘job’ is the subject. So, my point being that, while women work harder than men, no matter where they work—and while women are the best thing that ever happened to both children and grown men—they do work. When they have jobs, they comprehend that the venue is all about falsity, vanity, and greed—and they work at that. And even at jobs, women work harder and better than men.

But the Pol-Pundit lady was correct. Mrs. Romney has never had a job—and she should thank her lucky stars that she was never forced into the soul-sucking, dirty-ruled, cold-eyed world of Business. She, and all other SAH-Moms, are appreciated for being the heavy-lifters in the family, when it comes to actual work—but they must accept the fact that a ‘job’ is less ‘working’ and more of a ‘flensing’ (on a daily basis) and, while men have only ourselves to blame for business being this way, it is most definitely not the same as ‘working’.

Another tempest in a teapot, this controversy is simply an argument in semantics—and in the good old days before opposing truths became our intellectual currency, it would have been settled in that way without any prolonged debate. These days, most of the shouting is more about shouting than it is about real argument.

Some of my recent TV-exposure left some after-images in my poor brain. These included an Insurance Company ad with the tagline: “Keeping you alive is what Life Insurance is all about.” This is not something I can fully agree with. I can see where the new health awareness kick is looking to save them major bucks in the short term—and good for them, I suppose. But eventually their actuarial tables will have absorbed the lifestyle change (assuming it persists—no small assumption) and then their noble tag-line may undergo a sea-change.

What Life Insurance is all about is money—always has been, always will be. We pay for that insurance every year until we die—then, if the Insurance Company can’t find any way to squirm out of it, or put it off any longer (and they don’t file for bankruptcy) then, they pay the claim. It’s simply gambling in the form of a legal business—and while the courts may grant personhood to whatever business they like, I will not compound the problem by letting their TV ads convince me a company is concerned for my well-being—especially an Insurance Company.

Another recent TV ad reminds us that 12/21/2012 is the date the Mayans had predicted for The End Of The World. Ameritrade suggests that a more prudent strategy for your financial future would be to use their services. This is the first I’ve heard of how ‘playing the market’ is good for my future financial security—and how, even better than that, I should just let an Investment Firm have all of my money to ‘play the market’ with! Who worse to trust that money to than myself? What was I thinkin’?

Or maybe Ameritrade was being brutally honest in saying that “if you’re fool enough to anticipate Mayan Armageddon, then Ameritrade would be one step above that reasoning”. I can’t argue with that.