“Isn't it odd that so many foundations, big businesses, newspapers and colleges that once called themselves patriotic and pro-free market –- even some that still do -- fund their declared culture-war opponents? Once upon a bloodstain the size of several continents, Lenin said that we Americans would sell our enemies the rope with which they’d hang us. As usual he was wrong.
“We don’t sell rope to our enemies. We don’t even give it to them for free. We pay them to take it, and then we send advisors to teach them how to make a hangman’s noose.”
These are the views of a couple of pretty smart fellows from Indiana, who don’t wish to reveal their real names as yet because they like their jobs. We will call them, for simplicity’s sake, Indiana Smith and (you knew this was coming) Indiana Jones. Smith and Jones have started an e-mail “newsletter” to publicize their mix of conservative and libertarian views, and are in the process of building a newfangled “point/counterpoint” website with some friends of the liberal persuasion.
A different yardstick
Wait a minute: Can people with opposing views really be friends?
“How sad that it has come to that,” says Indy Smith, “as if politics was the most important thing in life, the only reason people banded together.” Smith says he has all kinds of friends, for all kinds of reasons, and that there are more important things to agree on than to argue over. Smith, Jones and what they call their “loony left buddies” have decided to band together in common cause, to fight a common enemy: bad thinking.
“That’s the new yardstick,” Indy Jones asserts. “More important than the belief itself is the process by which you came to it. For many people, TV soundbites and bumper stickers have replaced thinking. We are advocates, from the left and right and center, for good thinking.”
A member of the loose consortium overseen by Smith and Jones wrote an article, "Putting Descartes Before the Hordes," concerning critical thinking and the famed philosopher's Procedural Rule. Although the Indy Boys liked it, they disagreed with the notion that Americans would take to critical thinking by the example of a 17th century European smart aleck. The “proper thinker to put before middlebrow America may not be René Descartes,” Jones intones. It was Smith who wrote the most instructive passage, however.
Bart Simpson, philosopher
"We wholeheartedly agree with the ‘Descartes’ article. However, we have to reach the hordes on the level of Bart Simpson. When Nikita Kruschev told the United States, ‘We will bury you,’ he meant from within, not from without. How do you do that? You have to get control of the media, the education establishment, and privately owned guns. Uncle Sam has succeeded in the first two and is working on the last.
"We work in management at a steel mill in America’s heartland. [Understand why they use pseudonyms now?] Our concern is how to reach the guy out on the floor, who only watches the first ten minutes of the evening news, reads the front page of the local newspaper and believes he is being presented with an unbiased version of truth?
“It appears the masses that work on the floor are content with their paycheck and the government taking on their responsibilities so that they don't have to. Debunking political myths one person at a time is too slow, and it can always be counteracted by the evening news. Perhaps some rich conservative guy needs to purchase a major network or cable channel and present the news with their own biases, to counter the existing biases."
Crunched numbers
That’s what Smith and Jones think, anyway. What first comes to mind is that, besides a network, they would still need to battle it out among the decision-makers, leaders, politicians, the Fourth Estate – which means they’d still need the print media. Then, too, there’s the Internet (Fifth Estate? Sixth?), e-mail, which they’re already using, and other alternative delivery methods. They need what's called “bandwidth” –- and plenty of it.
Here's an angle on the publishing side of the equation: For political mags, a hundred thou is a lot of subscribers, but most of the mags lose money unless they're owned by a conglomerate or do some kind of fundraising on the side. But among the non-leftist (and non-conglomerate) periodicals, American Spectator has, I think, 200,000+ subscribers and National Review has 175,000 or so, and if you add in Reason, Insights on Liberty, Human Events, Liberty, St. Croix Review, The Independent Review, Insight, American Enterprise, Weekly Standard, etc., you get maybe three-quarters of a million, total.
These are so-so numbers for magazines, especially considering that, between them, TV Guide and Reader’s Digest have a circulation of over 20 million. For direct communication with 300 million Americans, or even just the 25 million voting-age ones to whom Smith and Jones would provide remedial critical thinking classes and civics lessons, the 11 mags listed above are next to worthless.
Change is inside out
The indirect, gradual changes that actually take place in societies and civilizations work from top to bottom, and inside out. That means that the larger social impact of influential, persuasive, consequential ideas upon the "cognitive elite" is diluted and delayed, as those ideas move through layers of society, as well as through time and space, creating their own resistance, friction and drag. And don’t forget that this ameliorative motion is against a current of PC blather and high-tech hogwash, professionally wrought to mislead and distract, at least according to Smith and Jones.
Now, Indy Boys, for argument's sake, let’s say you’ve got your large, well-funded, perhaps even profitable multimedia enterprise –- a few TV stations, some radio, a strong web presence, movies, publishing. Okay, then what?
Then you're still dealing with people whose minds you wish to change. How do you do that in a (still somewhat) free market with ubiquitous TV remote controls? How do you keep on proselytizing while losing viewers and consequent ad revenue? Face it, Indy Boys, “clear thinking” is a niche market with, at best, a few million Americans who are hip to what's happening. And hard truths alienate people, especially when they’re on pay-TV; folks just wanna have fun, y’know? As any good “marketer” will tell you, the trick is to make people both think and feel that they need what you have –- and feel strongly enough about it to part with hard-earned dough.
Like most of life, the Indy Boys insist, the process involves a seller, a buyer, a contract and a consummating transaction. The real business of America, President Coolidge said, is business; some 70-odd (some very odd) years later, restoring the power and reach of the American government to something approximating the Coolidge administration’s, one of Smith’s and Jones’s pet projects, should be the business of all real Americans. That’s what the Indy Boys say, anyway.
Issues of the future
Some folks say that America is a conservative nation. That would so completely depend on definitions –- semantics -– that commenting on the notion would take another whole article. But, starting with Bill Clinton in the 1990s, it does appear that mushy conservatism teamed up with pennypinching liberalism to create those great, gooey centrist positions that still poll well and sound sort of, well, mushily conservative and pennypinchingly liberal.
But GOP-Demo goo like charter schools and 2% tax cuts are hardly cutting edge with true believers, who prefer to tackle fundamental issues like, say, deleting half the cabinet departments and bringing every American serviceman home. Smith and Jones are likewise concerned with high-tech “assaults on our freedom” like video surveillance, e-mail and phone tapping, GPS-equipped license plates and other Big Brother moves.
“It’s starting to look like London in some big American cities,” Jones claims. “It started with surveillance cameras for catching speeders, a real soccer-mom kind of end-run around privacy concerns.” He goes on to say that, every time he hears a politician talk about “video security” in terms of fighting crime and protecting citizens, he knows it’s “really something else they mean” -– video surveillance of the populace.
These Indy Boys just do not trust their elected officials. “We don’t trust the government, either,” Smith adds cryptically, “which is a separate thing, of course.” Now, see, Indy Boys, you’ve got to watch what you say and how you say it. If you take this terminology, and these angles on the issues, to a GOP platform committee in any state of the union you will be sorely disappointed. If you’re not used to being called wackos, get used to it.
The reason is simple. The fact is, as a nation, we're really not that conservative. We’re complicated, capricious, complacent and comfy. And a lot of us just don’t want to think clearly about things, because that will put the multimedia show of modern life on hold.
How do you fight that? How do you convince spoiled kids of all ages, who live in Disneyland on a subsidized ticket, to grow up? This is what the Indy Boys are wondering.
I trust you're not in a hurry for the answer.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Don’t Toss That TV
The common-sense observation that the tool is not responsible for the carpenter's poor use of it has been enlisted to great effect in political debates, such as the one over gun control. Although the bumper sticker reductionism of "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is at once trite and true, the notion that people are indeed responsible for their actions, as well as the actions of the hammers and electric drills and handguns and SUV's under their control, seems like nothing so much as plain old common sense.
Of course, common sense is now quite uncommon. And so we find a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible “personal responsibility boosters” rejecting this straightforward thinking when the target of their ire is the mass media, specifically television. All of a sudden one starts hearing the sort of all-encompassing generalizations and one-size-fits-all thinking that typifies the average politician: “TV is a wasteland, a cesspool, that teaches our kids violence and mindless consumerism.” There’s no room for grey in this kind of thinking; it’s as black-and-white as the original Milton Berle series. And the chorus of voices is growing.
“Offending contraptions”
Recently, at his Glendale, California church’s weekly men’s meeting, Jerry Bray listened as a traveling evangelist beseeched the assemblage to toss their television sets, CD's and other "offending contraptions" in the garbage. Apparently, recycling them into toasters or space heaters would be acceptable, but they should most assuredly not be sold at a garage sale. "You can protect your family from TV poison without selling it to someone else, bargain price or otherwise," according to the brochure the evangelist distributes with cookies after his presentations.
If you “kill the devices that bring that filth into your home,” the brochure goes on to say, apparently you won't be missing a thing. In this abolitionist view, "there is no downside" to getting rid of the electronic multimedia funnels that pipe the sick and savage products of a “perverse and Godless” entertainment industry into the home. That’s pretty heady stuff there.
Yet, somehow, that sounds just like a poor carpenter blaming the tools again. We don't like what others are building with them, so out go the hammers and screwdrivers and belt sanders. We don’t like a few, or even a lot, of the programs, so out goes the TV. Hold on a second!
Puerile and perverted?
Over the last several years a growing number of concerned parents have opted to dump the TV set. Millions of well-meaning Moms and dedicated Dads have apparently decided that American TV fare today is 100% (im)pure, unalloyed crud. It's a wasteland “out there,” the argument goes, but you don’t have to bring it “into the family sanctuary.” The operative word here is “it,” which stands for all TV programming, from Homer Simpson smoking pot to the impressionist masterpieces of Seurat. “It” is all “worthless.”
Or is it? Certainly the most popular sit-coms, cop shows, reality TV and game shows are puerile and perverted pap, if not outright propaganda from “the unreconstructed sensualists of Hollywood-on-the-Volga” (that evangelist can turn a phrase!). But right there in TV Guide, sandwiched between channel listings for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Marilyn Manson paean to the joys of demonic possession, is a fabulous documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Just change the channel and there you go.
And look, on the next page of program listings -- floating above the blurb for the hot reality TV show of the moment (cops and hookers living in a car?), alongside the listing for an exposé of fascist cannibals in the Catholic Church –- is an invitation to watch Jesus of Nazareth and Moses, the Lawgiver back-to-back later in the week. That’s quite a spread, isn’t it?
Part-time parents
One semi-doting dad told me recently that he just doesn’t have time to monitor his 12-year-old son's viewing habits. What occurred to me, of course, is that he might as well have said that he just doesn’t have time to raise his son, to instill values in him, to teach him how to monitor himself. So the easy answer for this dad was to dump the TV altogether, a classic example of tossing the baby out with the bath water –- and the soap, washcloth, towel and tub, too. This young man will now be spared The Real Housewives of Atlanta even as he misses the opportunity to learn about the U.S. astronaut training program.
Certainly, I put it to the father, there is a way to avoid the former and take advantage of the latter, isn't there?
"Too much work and takes too long," he said. "It's easier just to get rid of it, all of it."
Yikes. Scary!
With hundreds of channels, there truly is something for everyone in the information-age cafeteria of "custom" TV, with the seemingly limitless choices of cable and satellite receivers now complemented by a bevy of new technologies for recording, delaying, replaying, taping, splicing, slicing and dicing the programs. With the capabilities come a torrent of content; in my area, the cable company gives me high-speed internet access and a TV package comprising all the channels I need, all for about $90 a month.
Still, I don't watch a whole lot of TV, and I never just plop down in front of it and scan channels. I get a Sunday paper primarily for the TV listings, and if something I want to watch is on during the coming week, I can make time to watch it (rare) or set the DVR to record it (common). My wife and I will unwind with the cooking shows (God bless Emeril Lagasse -– bam!); watch the various political spin squadrons twirl, thrust, parry and obfuscate on the talking-head cable shows; and occasionally deduce along with Sherlock Holmes just who did the dirty deed this time. These are not wasteland experiences, I assure you.
Acceptable alternatives
It is far too facile simply to relegate an entire technology to unimportance in one's life, and dangerous, too; you will miss a lot of what is happening around you. If you have children, you might be able to limit the damage done to your kids via TV programming by dumping the set, but you will also limit enriching experiences. They will see Miley Cyrus’s musical soap opera or Shannon Doherty's latest snotty Gen-whatever character anyway, whether at friends' homes or the mall or even school; but they won't see it with your play-by-play commentary, followed by a channel switch to the acceptable alternative you have investigated and provided.
Yes, TV is a non-stop, pervasive influence in our society. But a TV is just another tool; to rid your home of it may be a powerful statement, but in the end it is a self-defeating one. The challenge –- for parents particularly, but for the rest of us, too, who desire edification and intellectual stimulation, as well as occasional escapist fare (and that's okay too!) –- is to control this massively powerful technology. It is so powerful, in fact, that George Orwell populated 1984 with as many big, propaganda-spewing monitors as characters. Big Brother wouldn’t have been big without TV.
Interestingly, however, it wasn’t the fear of TV as a non-stop pitchman for an authoritarian state that stuck with people. No, it was TV turned the other way ’round, as a full-time silent snoop, that took hold as the technology matured into the 1950s and beyond. With the proliferation of video surveillance cameras in the UK (there are over 4 million in London alone), and their gradual introduction in the U.S. in the almost-benign form of “traffic cams,” perhaps we should not be too quick to view Orwellian paranoia as overheated and baseless.
Use vs. abuse
It is too early to tell how the public use and abuse of TV, video security systems and related technologies will all play out. It is true that a tool can be quickly transformed into a weapon; some things, like axes, are arguably both to begin with. It might help to view TV in this light. Ultimately, it is up to each one of us, acting for ourselves as well as for our children, to use our home's trusty axe to chop the wood that warms the hearth that heats the house and lights the room – so we can, in safety and comfort, read a story and see the accompanying illustrations.
An intruder, one who may even wish us harm, is always watching for us to let our guard down, so he can break in and grab that axe and use it against us. He may wish to sell sugar-coated nothingness to our kids when we’re not watching, swear a blue streak in a cable movie or otherwise foul our safe haven. But we are not powerless here. We are wide awake and diligent, and remember, when we go to sleep we can turn on the surveillance cameras and bolt the doors, both figuratively and literally. Still, as that traveling evangelist said, there are evildoers who are plotting to assault you and your kids across the airwaves and over the cable connection.
There is no good reason to miss out on DaVinci himself just because you want to keep The DaVinci Code out of your house. Sure, your “enemies” may try to take over the entire entertainment industry so that, one day, there will be no quality choices at all.
But just whose fault is it if you let that happen? And why would you want to hasten the day? Don’t do it. Don’t help the wrong side.
Don’t toss that TV.
Of course, common sense is now quite uncommon. And so we find a surprisingly large number of otherwise sensible “personal responsibility boosters” rejecting this straightforward thinking when the target of their ire is the mass media, specifically television. All of a sudden one starts hearing the sort of all-encompassing generalizations and one-size-fits-all thinking that typifies the average politician: “TV is a wasteland, a cesspool, that teaches our kids violence and mindless consumerism.” There’s no room for grey in this kind of thinking; it’s as black-and-white as the original Milton Berle series. And the chorus of voices is growing.
“Offending contraptions”
Recently, at his Glendale, California church’s weekly men’s meeting, Jerry Bray listened as a traveling evangelist beseeched the assemblage to toss their television sets, CD's and other "offending contraptions" in the garbage. Apparently, recycling them into toasters or space heaters would be acceptable, but they should most assuredly not be sold at a garage sale. "You can protect your family from TV poison without selling it to someone else, bargain price or otherwise," according to the brochure the evangelist distributes with cookies after his presentations.
If you “kill the devices that bring that filth into your home,” the brochure goes on to say, apparently you won't be missing a thing. In this abolitionist view, "there is no downside" to getting rid of the electronic multimedia funnels that pipe the sick and savage products of a “perverse and Godless” entertainment industry into the home. That’s pretty heady stuff there.
Yet, somehow, that sounds just like a poor carpenter blaming the tools again. We don't like what others are building with them, so out go the hammers and screwdrivers and belt sanders. We don’t like a few, or even a lot, of the programs, so out goes the TV. Hold on a second!
Puerile and perverted?
Over the last several years a growing number of concerned parents have opted to dump the TV set. Millions of well-meaning Moms and dedicated Dads have apparently decided that American TV fare today is 100% (im)pure, unalloyed crud. It's a wasteland “out there,” the argument goes, but you don’t have to bring it “into the family sanctuary.” The operative word here is “it,” which stands for all TV programming, from Homer Simpson smoking pot to the impressionist masterpieces of Seurat. “It” is all “worthless.”
Or is it? Certainly the most popular sit-coms, cop shows, reality TV and game shows are puerile and perverted pap, if not outright propaganda from “the unreconstructed sensualists of Hollywood-on-the-Volga” (that evangelist can turn a phrase!). But right there in TV Guide, sandwiched between channel listings for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Marilyn Manson paean to the joys of demonic possession, is a fabulous documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Just change the channel and there you go.
And look, on the next page of program listings -- floating above the blurb for the hot reality TV show of the moment (cops and hookers living in a car?), alongside the listing for an exposé of fascist cannibals in the Catholic Church –- is an invitation to watch Jesus of Nazareth and Moses, the Lawgiver back-to-back later in the week. That’s quite a spread, isn’t it?
Part-time parents
One semi-doting dad told me recently that he just doesn’t have time to monitor his 12-year-old son's viewing habits. What occurred to me, of course, is that he might as well have said that he just doesn’t have time to raise his son, to instill values in him, to teach him how to monitor himself. So the easy answer for this dad was to dump the TV altogether, a classic example of tossing the baby out with the bath water –- and the soap, washcloth, towel and tub, too. This young man will now be spared The Real Housewives of Atlanta even as he misses the opportunity to learn about the U.S. astronaut training program.
Certainly, I put it to the father, there is a way to avoid the former and take advantage of the latter, isn't there?
"Too much work and takes too long," he said. "It's easier just to get rid of it, all of it."
Yikes. Scary!
With hundreds of channels, there truly is something for everyone in the information-age cafeteria of "custom" TV, with the seemingly limitless choices of cable and satellite receivers now complemented by a bevy of new technologies for recording, delaying, replaying, taping, splicing, slicing and dicing the programs. With the capabilities come a torrent of content; in my area, the cable company gives me high-speed internet access and a TV package comprising all the channels I need, all for about $90 a month.
Still, I don't watch a whole lot of TV, and I never just plop down in front of it and scan channels. I get a Sunday paper primarily for the TV listings, and if something I want to watch is on during the coming week, I can make time to watch it (rare) or set the DVR to record it (common). My wife and I will unwind with the cooking shows (God bless Emeril Lagasse -– bam!); watch the various political spin squadrons twirl, thrust, parry and obfuscate on the talking-head cable shows; and occasionally deduce along with Sherlock Holmes just who did the dirty deed this time. These are not wasteland experiences, I assure you.
Acceptable alternatives
It is far too facile simply to relegate an entire technology to unimportance in one's life, and dangerous, too; you will miss a lot of what is happening around you. If you have children, you might be able to limit the damage done to your kids via TV programming by dumping the set, but you will also limit enriching experiences. They will see Miley Cyrus’s musical soap opera or Shannon Doherty's latest snotty Gen-whatever character anyway, whether at friends' homes or the mall or even school; but they won't see it with your play-by-play commentary, followed by a channel switch to the acceptable alternative you have investigated and provided.
Yes, TV is a non-stop, pervasive influence in our society. But a TV is just another tool; to rid your home of it may be a powerful statement, but in the end it is a self-defeating one. The challenge –- for parents particularly, but for the rest of us, too, who desire edification and intellectual stimulation, as well as occasional escapist fare (and that's okay too!) –- is to control this massively powerful technology. It is so powerful, in fact, that George Orwell populated 1984 with as many big, propaganda-spewing monitors as characters. Big Brother wouldn’t have been big without TV.
Interestingly, however, it wasn’t the fear of TV as a non-stop pitchman for an authoritarian state that stuck with people. No, it was TV turned the other way ’round, as a full-time silent snoop, that took hold as the technology matured into the 1950s and beyond. With the proliferation of video surveillance cameras in the UK (there are over 4 million in London alone), and their gradual introduction in the U.S. in the almost-benign form of “traffic cams,” perhaps we should not be too quick to view Orwellian paranoia as overheated and baseless.
Use vs. abuse
It is too early to tell how the public use and abuse of TV, video security systems and related technologies will all play out. It is true that a tool can be quickly transformed into a weapon; some things, like axes, are arguably both to begin with. It might help to view TV in this light. Ultimately, it is up to each one of us, acting for ourselves as well as for our children, to use our home's trusty axe to chop the wood that warms the hearth that heats the house and lights the room – so we can, in safety and comfort, read a story and see the accompanying illustrations.
An intruder, one who may even wish us harm, is always watching for us to let our guard down, so he can break in and grab that axe and use it against us. He may wish to sell sugar-coated nothingness to our kids when we’re not watching, swear a blue streak in a cable movie or otherwise foul our safe haven. But we are not powerless here. We are wide awake and diligent, and remember, when we go to sleep we can turn on the surveillance cameras and bolt the doors, both figuratively and literally. Still, as that traveling evangelist said, there are evildoers who are plotting to assault you and your kids across the airwaves and over the cable connection.
There is no good reason to miss out on DaVinci himself just because you want to keep The DaVinci Code out of your house. Sure, your “enemies” may try to take over the entire entertainment industry so that, one day, there will be no quality choices at all.
But just whose fault is it if you let that happen? And why would you want to hasten the day? Don’t do it. Don’t help the wrong side.
Don’t toss that TV.
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