How can the most corrupt administration in U.S. history continue to rely on the attention deficit of the public? The medium is the message.
Say that you are watching a baseball game. Say that the Pirates bitterly protest from their dugout every time a strike is called on one of their hitters or an out signaled against one of their runners. They eventually so wear upon the umpires nerves that the worthy arbiters unconsciously distort calls to avoid controversy. As the game wears on the opposition Patriots grow increasingly frustrated. Their hitters are rung up on bad pitches and their runners called out when they clearly beat the throw. From the other dugout come taunts like Stop whining!" and We got squeezed toodeal with it!" Even the foul lines dont stay firm. A hit can fall a yard foul for a Pirate yet be ruled fair while a hit can fall ten feet fair for a Patriot and be ruled foul. If the Patriots manager tries to argue with a verdict on the basis of the rule book the Pirates manager presents the umpire with a revised book pages torn out here and there and impromptu corrections" scrawled in the margins. For good measure the announcers blare away in an overtly partisan manner for the Pirates while droves of fans are admitted late without having to purchase tickets and given Pirate jerseys and free beer.
It wouldnt be much a game would it? No worries: youll never see this travesty on the diamond. Once the Pirates mouthing started umpires would be emptying their dugout until not enough players remained in it to continue the game. As for shortchanging the other side at some point the Pirate fielders themselves would openly smirk and mock the officiating if Patriot runners were called out who arrived five seconds before throw or tag. Even the most rabidly partial Pirate fans would revolt if Patriot homers over the center-field fence were called foul balls. People who play and watch baseball have too much respect for the gamefor its rules traditions elaborate balance and complex rhythmto participate in turning the show into a sham.
Such is not the case in politicsnot any more. The progressive piratical forces that dominate the Democrat Party do not consider anyone on the other team to have any inviolable rights. Rules only apply when they encumber your opposition never when they get in your teams way. A patently obvious fact is untrue if it works to your causes disadvantage: reality is defined by desired outcome. A victory for the right side" (i.e. the Left just to avoid confusion) must be assumed a priori: the density of fiction employed on the way to that victory is a matter of mere implementation supplied more or less heavily in spots the way a trench is back-filled to give an even surface. The truth is permissible when its narrative runs smoothly; when facts create bumps they must be pulverized.
The Watergate and Iran/Contra scandals were crises that brought the Republic to the brink of chaos and cried to high heaven for chief administrators to finish their lives in jail. Fast-and-Furious is a lower-level blunder Solyndra an innocent miscalculation Benghazi a partisan fabrication Extortion 17 a non-event (have you heard of it?) the IRS bullying of conservative charities a bureaucratic malfunction massive voter fraud a blow against racism the wiretapping of journalists an unfortunate misunderstanding. That ball was never hityou just saw a white piece of litter blow over the fence. That runner was outhe never touched the bag and even if he did... well theres a rule about leaving the box before you hit the ball and he probably broke that one. And his shirt wasnt tucked in.
I dont think Im alone in my bemusement. Sometimes I sit down with a mug of tea in a quiet room stare out the window and wonder if there may be a Darwinian explanation for the Left. Maybe homo sapiens branched into two radically different strains fifty million years ago. These people... they have no respect for the truth no sense of decency or fairness no aversion to rank hypocrisy no internal alarm to modify their arrogance and egotism. They are brutes... theyre ravening animals. You can trust them to honor a contract whose terms impede their urges about as securely as you can trust a chimp not to touch a mass of bananas after you open his cage and walk away. They produce the likes of Nancy Pelosi Maxine Waters Bill Maher and Susan Sarandon… yet they say with a straight face and even with insistent cock-sureness that they have all the wit intelligence and rectitude on their side. I guess a bunch of baboons would say the same thing if they could talk. Dumb humans... they dont even know how to chase a hyena off of an impala carcass and tear away the good meat! How are they still alive the stupid fools! Waitturn around! You have a tick on your back. Yum!"
I dont know. They kind of look like us... but only on the outside. What happened to them on the inside? If it isnt something in the genetic code something very deep and consequential... then what?
I have known for several years that communications technology has altered the way people thinkand even from a certain perspective their ability to think. Every classroom teacher over forty knows as much. You can tell a group of students five times to do a simple task having first ascertained that theyre not texting and have logged off of Facebook... and ten percent of them will still go to their graves swearing that the instructions were never given. Another ten percent will have needed all five announcements and another ten at least four announcements. Probably not more than a quarter of the class or a third at most would register the original directive after one clear broadcast.
Are these young people stupid? Their behavior replicates that of older people whom without hesitation we would call mentally challenged. Rush Limbaugh politely refers to the lot both young and old as low-information". But why is so little information being received?
There are several theories. Varieties of information are in constant competition because of the convenience and portability of media; hence more boring" varieties (i.e. those less focused on the receivers immediate selfish interests) are neglected. I think theres also clearly a state of mind associated with being wired and online: that is with having the bud of an iPod in ones ear while texting and keeping an eye on a computer monitor. Inattention becomes a learned behavior in some sense rather than the default condition of untrained minds. Its almost necessary for survival. Human figures beyond the receivers noospace" (or mindworld") as well turn into mere playthings. Real persons must compete for a share of the present with realistic representationsand the former have no more right to common courtesy let alone rapt attention than the latter.
A sad irony here is that people like Rush constantly promote the latest i-tech in the sincere conviction that they are serving free enterprise and Yankee ingenuity. They do not see that this revolution is a collective lobotomy for the electorate even though it may also be styled a triumph for the Space Race emergency warning systems and so forth. The carry-over of these communications miracles into the marketplace has never unleashed the sort of individualism into the world that commentators like George Gilder have prophesied. Yes ordinary people have been given instant access to a global forum by the Internet... but who pays any attention to them unless they cipher in the sexy shorthand of instant gratification? How many people visit Intellectual Conservative daily in comparison to the numbers that follow Dennis Rodman or Beonc on Twitter?
The medium is the message wrote another prophet with far greater truth than he realized. Marshall McLuhan belonged to my fathers generation. Neither one of those worthy men would have thought that television would midwife that regressive species the Couch Potato when it first arrived in ordinary households during the fifties. It was terrific diversionstimulating vilifying fertilizing. Only decades later did we figure out as pictures got better and for TV" writing got worse that brain activity was flatlining in front of the miracle box.
Communications gizmos are but one high-tech tentacle of the many that have throttled our intellectual and cultural life. I hope to write about the disappearance of agriculture from daily existence in the near future for that shift has also had major consequences. Yet I scarcely think that anything can be more important than the manner in which thoughtswords that convey thoughts and increasingly full-formed sequences of imagesare piped into our brains. I think voters follow the Left in the same way that they follow their pop-cultural heroes on Twitter; they like" a mouthy candidate in the same way that they like" a snarky post in a chatroom; and they salivate like Pavlovs dog at Hollywood-inculcated cues such as industrialist" big oil" rogue reporter" and female detective". These voters are people who think associatively: dont give them linear logicgive them icons and keyword phrases. They are low-information because theyre instant-processing.
Ive been editing for a friend a long essay about the classic 1968 television series The Prisoner. If you havent seen it prepare yourself for a look into the futureinto our present. I believe my colleague is quite right that surveillance technology is merely a sub-species of communications technology. Weve already reached the point where we can be watched by our laptop camera as we view the Internet where cookies monitor our preferences and selections in shopping and where we volunteer immense amounts of sensitive personal information on Facebook just to fit into conform in a counter-conformist way to be one of the Villages progressive sheep. Changing the content of college History and Civics classes will not save our children from the twenty-first century assommoir. The medium is the message. If we continue to let our media rule us rather than learning how to hold them in check then we will not recognize our grandchildren. We will have about the same level of exchange with them as Jefferson might have had with Washo the Chimp.