The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
I don't always like Friedman, (in fact, he's pretty goofy more often than not) but he hit the nail on the head there. We are currently in the middle of a dark period in our nation's history.
We appear to be past the worst of it. Back in the 2004 campaign, John Kerry had to refrain from being too critical of Bush because the majority of Americans would be shocked to the point of disbelief to be exposed to a dose of reality. The media has been so bad that there are just some things that you can't say in a public forum because the American public isn't ready to hear it.
I work in a company that is full of people who are in the 20% or so of the population that would support Bush even if he went on national TV and started clubbing kittens with a baseball bat. When politics comes up, I just keep my mouth shut. They're not even on the same planet as me. Their core beliefs are built on layers and layers and layers of Fox News propaganda. If I were to, for instance, describe the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby scandal from start to finish, they would think I had gone mad. It would be like I told them the sky wasn't blue or that the Rangers will win 80 games.
The cause of this divorce from reality in our discourse is two-fold: First and foremost, the major players in our media are owned by an increasingly small number of corporations: GE, Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corp. That's just about it. And those companies all have infiltrated their respective news branches and actively filter content, and hire and fire employees based on corporate loyalty. Secondly, the media has been corrupted by GOP intimidation. The Republicans have managed to convince everybody that the media has a strong liberal bias -- never mind that much of the media has become little more than a fog horn for the Bush administration; they're still liberal!! Whenever the media is critical of the administration, they can expect to get angry phone calls and threats from all directions. Simply put, they're just scared of the Republicans.
As I have discussed previously, I believe talk radio is also part of the problem. Anti-intellectualism is at an all-time high. Many attempts to discuss issues intelligently are ridiculed when, obviously, an intelligent discussion of issues is exactly what we need.
I'm not sure exactly how we can pull out of this tailspin we're in, but I do know the Internets need to be heavily involved. That's why Net Neutrality is so important. I didn't pay a dime to start this blog, yet it is readily available to anybody in the entire world who wants to read it. If my blog were to take off (stick with me now) for whatever reason, and start getting 700,000 hits per day or something, my content providers are going to want to charge me for that exposure -- but I shouldn't be charged. That's precisely how we will tear television's death grip on the national dialog away.
This is also another reason I'm supporting Barack Obama. If you watch his speech to the Google campus on technology, you'll see that he plans to not only push for Net Neutrality, but also he wants to use the Internet to help make the operations of the federal government much more transparent. The more transparency there is, the less corruption is possible, and the harder it becomes for the media to spin a narrative away from reality.
Maybe some day, I will be able to walk up to my coworkers and tell them that George W. Bush is trying to usurp power away from Congress and the Supreme Court, that he is openly violating the Constitution by holding "enemy combatants" in prison indefinitely without access to a lawyer or to our legal system, that he is actively covering for Alberto Gonzalez in the U.S. Attorney scandal, and covering for somebody high up (probably Cheney) in the Plame scandal and not have them stare at me like I'm from outer space.
No comments:
Post a Comment