Cowboy Confessional

A number of inconvenient truths, along with leaked emails and computer source code, rendered Al Gore’s fatalistic forecasts fragile.  Barack Obama’s continuing adoration of Keynesian economic theory has earned him the distrust of everyone waiting in an unemployment line.  We all flinched at the thought of Larry Craig’s public bathroom tap dancing and nobody believed that Bill Clinton didn’t have sex with that woman.

It is enough to make you distrust politicians.

America’s worst kept secret, aside from several metric tons of WikiLeaked diplomatic cables, is that people in politics prevaricate.  Such practices are not peculiar to the elected class.  Fibs are also fostered by policy groups and major media outlets.  For centuries Americans have endured the media-politician complex, a carnal cabal that has the tacit – and perhaps explicit – objective of nurturing their incestuous powers.  Operatives are swapped between these three Meccas of misinformation more freely than bodily fluids at a San Francisco sex club.

But let’s leave Barney Frank out of the discussion.

Lying’s basic objective is to obtain what one cannot otherwise get honestly.  Hence, people with ideological visions of an improved nation – or those who simply need to line their pockets with greener fabric – spin falsehoods in order to victimize voters.  When America devolved from being a constitutional republic to a mere democracy, politicians and media politicos realized that enacting their Eden required hoodwinking only 50% of the electorate.  Little wonder that our prevailing propaganda processes arose alongside mass communications.  Convincing half a population to do dumb things requires talking to at least 50% of the people.

Therein lay the rub with us rubes.

As average citizens developed their own means and modes of communication, upper estates came to ruin.  Martin Luther used printing presses to cripple the most powerful institution of his time, and latter day disciples of the world’s innumerable sects continued the process, rendering Gawd himself somewhat schizophrenic in appearance.  Talk radio divided an inbred broadcast media and created authentic political dialogue – actually, more like dueling monologues – which neutered the three Horsemen of the Intellectual Apocalypse (ABC, CBS, NBC).  Citizen media uncloaked the upper estates, confirming that kings often were in the buff.

But let’s leave Bill and Monica out of the discussion.

The Internet has accelerated mass communications, handing authority to the unwashed masses (that would be you, Bubba).  No utterance by policy groups, pundits or unincarcerated politicians goes unchecked.  Pajama-clad activists scan the Internet agora, rummaging for claims to eviscerate and quotes to excise. Unpaid researchers, able and brave enough to excavate rhetorical effluvium, haunt outlets of opposition opinion, assessing every adverb and vetting all alleged facts.  Every error is reported, shared, linked, back-linked and broadcast.  Today this mainly produces vast quantities of rude online commentary.

Over the long run, it creates understanding, perspective and perhaps even trust.

A subtle shift is occurring in the belly of the body politic.  Two trends have emerged as citizen media grows and mainstream media fades, while peers argue after peering into opponent policies.  First, the number of voters self-identifying as independents grows while those publicly aligned with the two major parties drops.  Excepting extremists, people understand that what all factions want more than anything else is a bit of freedom and choice.  Liberals are relenting on school vouchers and gun control while conservatives are accepting same-sex marriage and possibly re-legalizing lightweight narcotics. Mass participation in the new mass media is gradually composing more consensuses.

This creates problems for politicians. Being well versed at divisional politics was once a serviceable talent, but now paints practitioners as the common enemy in the eyes of growing Independent ranks.  Like or loathe the Tea Party as you wish, but they took scalps from both major factions in the last election cycle on ideological grounds.  Partisanship is being supplanted by a non-aligned idealism that, at its most basic, says that the government must obey and keep out of bedrooms and wallets. Without the media-politician complex to supervise thinking, the people are thinking on their own, making Martin Luther style heretics of us all.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Sunday, May 15th, 2011 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Buncombe, Culture, Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.