Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Off to Manchester shortly for a couple of days, so blogging temporarily suspended. I was going to write about the worst piece of political coverage the BBC has done in a long time - that of the US Democratic primaries. I can't claim to be a politics wonk, or to be very interested in what's happening in the US, but I do keep one ear open and like to be a little bit informed. But now the whole thing's been wrapped up in Obama's favour, despite blanket coverage on the usually informative Radio 4, I can't claim to have a clue what the different policies which Obama and Clinton were respectively putting forward.

Endless speculation about who was up and who was down, minute dissection of every gaffe and who was defecting to which side, but policies ... one of them may have been planning to give a free toffee apple to every American child, the other might have been in favour of a radical massacre of the first-born, but if so, either they didn't tell, or nobody asked. Maybe it wasn't the BBC's fault - maybe content-free presentational politics is a virus spreading from the US, I don't know. But I do have a problem with it - in a democracy, how on earth is anybody supposed to make an informed choice when no candidate will propose or oppose concrete policies or the news media don't dig below the presentation and the beauty contest between the two candidates?

There's a quotation from William Blake (who I think was away with the faries most of the time, but was right on the money here) about the importance of the concrete and specific, as opposed to general platitudes, and I leave you with his thought:

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.