I spent my evening watching television, as I always do. It’s my job, to watch cable news all night. Well, part of it, anyway. The rest of my job is to provide the facts that should be told.

The TV journos, for the most part, stick with the facts my staff provides them. Unfortunately, we can’t do a damn thing about all the pontificating they do around those facts. And that pontification so often hides the facts — and sometimes contradicts them — that I frequently wonder what the hell I’m doing here.

My colleagues, you see — particularly those who report from inside the Beltway — see themselves as prognosticators of a sort. Which would be fine if they paid attention to the facts. But they don’t. They get something in their heads that they decide is The Way Things Are or Will Be, and they talk and talk and talk until the facts are buried under a mudslide of bullshit that has precious little to do with real life.

Sometimes, it makes me angry. But more often, all that obfuscation just makes me sad. Very, very sad.

But tonight it struck me that the news isn’t news anymore. It’s entertainment. Maybe it’s been that way for a long time, but it seemed particularly obvious on this evening.

Tonight’s “news” was (again) a bad skit from a comedy show that nobody watches anymore, a corrupt ex-politician’s short stint on Dancing with the Stars (again), a late-night host’s private life (again) and (again) two stupid people who thought it was a good idea to turn their too-large family into a reality show.

Oh, and there were three 7.0 plus magnitude earthquakes within 70 minutes in the South Pacific somewhere. That was pretty exciting for a while, but nobody died, so it’s OK. Back to politics as entertainment. Let’s bring on Ann Coulter to “debate” with a thinking liberal.

I argue with my therapist (yes, I have one) about human nature all the time. She’s a bit of a pessimist and thinks war, viciousness, criminal behavior, hate, torture and such are human nature. I think those are learned behaviors. Seriously. Do you really think it was human nature for, say, Romans to devise the ghoulish games they put on in the Coliseum? I don’t. I think they learned it.

Nature vs. nurture. Now, sure, there are some folks with mental problems that no amount of nurture will ever cure. And no matter how nurturing your home life may be, you’ve got the rest of the world, brought into your home in living color via the InterTubez  and TV, to counteract the goodness. It’s damn hard to overcome those kind of obstructions.

But some of us manage to do it. I suspect it has something to do with learning to think for yourself at a young age, to ask questions. If that was you, you probably drove your parents nuts with your incessant questions. But you were doing what you were supposed to do. Provided your parents didn’t quash your curiosity, you probably matured into a reasonable, intelligent adult who understands that things aren’t always what they seem and the best way to figure out what they really are is to ask questions and find the answers for yourself.

So, if you were a Roman child, you might have asked why mom and dad go to the arena to see men fight each other to the death or to see wild animals tear apart defenseless humans. Your parents might have told you that it was entertaining. You might have accepted that, in which case you’d grow up to be just like them. Or you might have thought, What the hell is entertaining about watching people die in horrendous manners? If that were the case, you might have grown up to play a role in ending that most inhumane of spectacles.

Or maybe, you were lucky enough to have parents who didn’t see the entertainment value of death, in which case, you were way ahead of the curve.

Today, we’ve got the political equivalent of the Roman bloodsport, televised. We don’t even need to head down to the arena to watch. It’s right there on the small screen, with the analysts ready to tell us what it’s all about, not too dissimilar to the announcers at those World Wrestling Entertainment events, stirring up controversy and pitting politicians against politicians in cage match interviews.

Kids are asking their parents what the hell is going on. It’s not an easy question to answer, at least not for the thinking adult. For the non-thinking adult — those who are fully engaged in the brutality — the answer’s easy. We have to annihilate the other guy, they’ll say, to save the country so you can grow up the way we want you to grow up. Some kids will buy that. Others won’t.

And some parents will say that it’s sad, frustrating and self-defeating, and we must do our best to counter that with calm reason. It’s not easy, when all around us are the signs of unhinged thinking and irrational behavior. But the times they are a-changin’, and we have to do our part.

Some days, I don’t feel much like that. Some days, I want to throw all of Congress into a Roman arena with a few “commentators” and unleash the lions. But that would only be temporarily satisfying, and it would set back progress a few centuries.

For some of us, though, that thought is never far from the forefront. I’ll never forget the lashing I got many years ago from folks I thought were on “my” side when I wrote a column in the newspaper I worked for condemning a sign I saw on the way to work one morning.

It was during Bush I’s administration, as the United States was preparing to attack Iraq. “Beat Bush into a plowshare,” the sign said. I wrote that that sentiment was no better than the war at any cost sentiment coming out of Washington. I got slammed, hard, for my efforts.

But I still don’t think it’s human nature to be so violent, so bloodthirsty. I think it’s learned behavior, pure and simple, and right now, it’s up to us to teach a better way.

We’ll start by telling the truth, the facts, over and over again, as long as it takes. It’ll be discouraging, and there’ll be much disappointment. But we’ll get there.

This isn’t entertainment, it’s not games. It’s our lives, something too many of us have forgotten, or perhaps never realized at all.