A Little Nonsense Now and Then is Relished by the Wisest Men

Much of what we have written thus far on The Dissentators concerns our troubling public discourse -- one mangled and rotted from the inside, bereft of reason and, perhaps most troubling, our inability to summon synthesis from the warring factions. Many factors, of course, feed these pernicious roots -- the partisian politics of Washington, the Manaechian world view of our administration, the talking heads of 24 hour news networks -- and we who write for free on the internet are not without blame. There is a theme to much of the hot air hanging over our debates, and that was pointed out in a recent article on the Huffington Post that examines what its author calls, SPIRD or Smartest Person in the Room Disorder:

"SPIRD symptoms include, but are not limited to: thinking you should know all the answers, thinking you have all the answers, bulging forehead blood vessels, shouting down the opposition and an impulsive need to demonize or ruin your adversary."

I will be the first to admit that I have suffered lapses of this not so rare condition. Sometimes, I get riled up (Johnny Mac knows all about this) and don't have all the fact on hand, so, flailing desperately to prove my point (which I truly do believe in and want to convince someone else of) I may make a broad generalization or snobily delve into the swirling eddy that is my memory of our college core curriculum. This does not mean that if you allude to Hume's position on utilitarianism or some other big name, that you are just posturing. Many people really do remember that stuff. I just want to get this out of the way so as to avoid any overarching hypocrisy to this post.

As I have been out of America for a few months now, I am able to dodge much of the SPIRD bombardment that I would get back home. I don't have television, or more precisely I do, but it's three fuzzy channels, one of which plays Cricket nonstop (speaking of bullshit). So, the easiest things to watch over the internet are old Charlie Rose shows and Real Time with Bill Maher, once someone has kindly uploaded it onto YouTube over the weekend. What I've noticed is that not only have we really begun to rely on celebrities for their opinions on serious issues (i.e. Tom Cruise's expertise with the History of Psychology, which HE'S READ!) but that most of the talking heads are more personality than substance. What I'm getting at is the lack of rhetorical whimsy from learned men of letters who once populated American televisions.

What happened to them? They're either gone or close too it, and those Baby Boomers didn't supply us with much in the way of replacements.

George Plimpton: Founder of the Paris Review, who wrote with equally loving prose about Dick Butkiss and Muhamid Ali as well as world figures. Now, he's gone. So it goes.

Gone too are the days when pre-election coverage had relatively high minded debate, between such figures as Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, as they had in 1968. Hell, even such scornful figures like Joseph McCarthy quoted poetry throughout his witch hunt; take that for what you will, but at least it reveals an interest and respect for finely crafted language. I don't mean to say that all of it was great back then(certainly 1968 is a year more famous for its tragedies and turmoil than for its rhetoric), as Kurt Vonnegut said, "There weren't good old days. There were just days." But at least these eruidite public figures, as full of snobbery and pomp as anyone, had a shot at being the smartest person in the room.

This is not to say that there aren't a few public intellectuals out there, but their presense is so mired in controversy or silenced by the dismissing and loud mouthed men and women who share the screen that their status is dimished and their rhetoric dimsissed as snobbery -- intellectuals such as the much maligned Christopher Hitchens or Tony Kushner. And from our political figures we find no source of linguistic redemption. Even someone like John Kerry, who in 1971 gave a unabashedly eloquent speech in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had over the course of 33 years lost even a hint of his prior flair for oratory. And I don't need to get into examples when it comes to presidential oration.

I cannot say for sure whether anything would be different today if the airwaves were once again populated with public intellectuals, but at the very least we wouldn't have to suffer the societal symptoms that spread from contemporary SPIRD. I do believe that there was an era when eriudition and intellectualism were sought after ideals -- when Charles Van Doren graced the cover of Time Magazine and we rooted for a team of scientists and brave pilots to race to the moon. We could have it again, and I hope that our politics have not breeched the event horizon of cynicism, so that our hopes for a truly collective effort (possibly our global environmentalist cause), founded on reason and pushed forward by rhetoric, may be made manifest.

Maybe I should just let them speak for themselves. Here is a clip from Buckley's old show, Firing Line, when he debates a young Noam Chomsky.

Mission Accomplished: Now Let's Write Us Some History

Throughout a standard education in U.S. History, one is undoubtably to hear the phrase -- or cliche -- "History is written by the winners." I don't know who coined it, but I remember, when I first heard it in those halcyon days of High School, it was easy enough to absorb its obvious truths and then, like most people, quickly dismiss it. When you're a student and just trying to get through those traumatic years of adolescence, there is no real reason to question further -- If History is written by "the winners" then what part of the picture is missing? Also, we won, right?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have only recently discovered the scholarship of Noam Chomsky. I was 15 when Good Will Hunting came out and it was the first time I ever heard a reference to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, and in the same scene, Will makes reference to Howard Zinn's People's History of The United States. Both books and, indeed, both authors are usually stigmatized as "radicals" and shoved neatly to the side of more conventional approaches to U.S. History. Both these professors hold mirrors up to American life and history and by marginalizing their voices, we have lost something invaluable: a sense of who we are and the country in which we live.

I admit, that if only for literary purposes, I much prefer reading the standard version of American history. I marvel at our relatively young nation's ability to have so quickly embraced an almost mythical creation narrative -- great men, in defiance of the tyrannical ruler from a distant land, established what is in my opinion one of the great works of art in history. For many, including myself, this myth is enough to embolden endless patriotism, but our understanding of our "Founding Fathers" and this period of our history must delve further if we are to truly grasp the nature of their intentions and the limitations of our country.

We hold the Bill of Rights today as an almost sacred document, yet there remain glaring anachronisms within its text (the whole thing about quartering a British soldier). We often overlook the plight of the Native Americans involved in America's "Manifest Destiny" expansion. The truth is that the founding fathers were not perfect men -- they understood all too well their own limitations -- and it took decades of atrocities and the Civil War for us to finally get rid of one of America's most relied upon institutions, slavery. There are endless examples of haineous and absure acts committed by past leaders, not the least of which is the duel pictured above between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

I don't need to go through all the nonsense etched on the underbelly of U.S. History, for that you can read Zinn. The process that those of us interested in America -- and who claim devout patriotism -- must undertake is akin to those moments of our youth which sparked our adolescent angst -- when you first see your father cry or the epiphanies that lead you to the fact that your parents are not the embodiment of perfection. Just as it became clear that your parents were human, so it must be revealed that your homeland is deeply flawed. While at first this may be tough to accept (hence those years of adolescence), it is a necessary step towards self-realization and maturity. As we come to discover, those prelapsarian versions of your parents weren't true and that the love you have for them after the fall is that much deeper because of it. Realizing your parents are imperfect brings them down to you, painfully exposing what is also flawed in you, but the end result is an understanding that leads to empowerment.

It is the same with our relationship to American history and to our current government. When we place our officials on untouchable pedastols, we strip them of their human qualities and, by doing so, we blind ourselves to the plain reality of their faults. (Side note: It is almost paradoxical Americans liked Bush cause he was just a regular guy, and many of those who elected him for this reason refuse to accept the limitations and faults that their "regular guy" president has.) Accepting the defects of our govenment and the human frailties of our leaders is not unpatriotic; in fact, it can deepen ones patriotism, for if our leaders are flawed like we are then what is stopping us from becoming leaders ourselves. We each hold a stake in this country and it's future narrative, but before we work together towards a "more perfect union", we must first embrace its past and present imperfections. Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government..." at face value a cynical take, but then he added, "...except for all those others that have been tried." So we must first admit that we were dealt a less than great hand, but it's the best out there and it remains encumbant upon us to improve upon it.

Voices of dissent or criticism are not "radical"; they are necessary. If Chomsky and Zinn are "radical" it is only because they wish to provide us with an alternative (and extremely necessary) lens through which to view ourselves -- as lens usually omitted from standard education. The real truism is that when our History is syphoned through the winners' pens, we all lose something.

What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us

In 1933, H.G. Wells published his prophetic novel and coined the title phrase, The Shape of Things to Come. In it, with uncanny accuracy, Wells predicted that Germany would begin the next great war by invading Poland in 1940. So, fine, the guy was a year off, but this remains only one of a multitude of his nearly exact predictions. Wells understood the mechanisms that drove mankind, that motivated leaders and that spawned technological innovations. And yet at the close of a lifetime of sagacious predictions and commentary, Wells was overwhelmed by the futility of his predictions, for WWII and nuclear weaponry and devastating air assaults (all of which he predicted) came to be; the future was and is inevitable and prosaic and damn demoralizing.

Today, with a bill passed by Congress headed towards a certain Bush veto, the debate on our current war continues, and it's beginning to feel as though despite the veil that has been lifted since the early years of our occupation nothing much has changed -- the administration still mired in the dialectic of prowar/American/support troops vs. stopwar/un-America/get the troops out. It feels as though we the people are ready for change, yet those other institutions, our government and press, remain in a slo-mo stupor.

For those of you who haven't watched Bill Moyers' "Buying the War", then please just take the time. It is a fascinating retrospective on the role the media played in beating the drums to war. If the invasion of Iraq were prosecuted as a war crime then the media would be willing accomplices. My viewing of this documentary happen to coincide with my too-late discovery of Noam Chomsky, who, in this context, could easily be equated with H. G. Wells as a prophetic sage. Like Wells, Chomsky understands with staggering clarity the mechanisms that influence the unfurling of world events and those that are used to cover some of them up. One of his main theses is that in a democratic society, one that cannot openly be controled with force (such as with a dictotorship), the powers that be must, instead, control the minds and opinions of the public. And their greatest tool is the media. The word itself, "media", denotes their role as intermediaries between power and the people. The press provides a lens, however warped or opaque, and only through it can we see turn the gears of power. The effect of this mediated information, for us, appears in the form of general inattention or complancency. As Chomsky said in 1969:

"A terrifying aspect of our society and other societies is the equanimity oand the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events, as in Veitnam. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler, LeMay, or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity."

In this regard, we, too, are compliant in this war, but we are relieved of some guilt for it remains the media's duty to provide us with the fruits of their investigative labor. When they cease to offer such insight, we are, in effect, the unwitting dupes of governmental propoganda. The Moyers' study, like Farenheit 9/11 did more subjectively, candidly investigates the perverse relationship that our government and our media share. (side note: What, for me, was the most revelatory aspect of our media's compliance with the government was how wide-spread this phenomenon was -- not just Fox News, but CBS, NBC, and in arguably the most chilling moment, Oprah helped to convince us into war.) The Moyers' documentary is a seminal piece of our current journalistic lamentation for their own shortcomings. Along with this comes the passing of an icon of honest and admirable journalism, David Halberstam, whose legacy has been invoked in many recent Op-Ed piece in further confession by the media for a job not well done.

If there's anything more than the press love than "making news out of nothing at all", it's turning their cobwebbed critical gaze back on themselves. If you look around you'll notice that newspapers are inundated with either self-flaggelation or self-defense for the press's handling of the past 6 years. Personally, I'm thankful for journalists like Bill Moyers, David Halberstam, and if you'll forgive the loose definition of "journalist" Jon Stewart (watch his recent interview with Bill Moyers). Their honesty and watchful eye, however, should not be the pinnacle of skeptical inquiry and reporting, but the standard. The fourth estate is for many our only means to discover who is pulling what levers.

This is not the time, however, for such self-assessment. We need you, media -- reporters, journalists, talking heads -- to cease with the lamentation and intra-office nonsense and get out there and let us know what's going on. Stop licking your wounds and start to poke holes in the talking points from both sides. Do it for Halberstam; do it for the memory of H.G. Wells whose predictions were never heeded; and do it for the legacy of Noam Chomsky whose deserves more than a little attention during his lifetime.