Max B. Sawicky wrote:
Or as the Gene Wilder character
says in Blazing SAddles, "These are simple farmers
. . . you know. Morons."
The bullet you really have to bite in a social dem
or I suspect any democratic context is that a lot of
what the public wants or can be convinced to support
is crap. Crap is the price you pay for the important
stuff.
This may to an extent describe existing reality, but I would politely
ask, what purpose does it serve to recite demeaning truisms?
My point is that referring to the working class as "wanting crap", or as
"morons" is counter-productive not to say a form of looking down the
nose. More appropriate if we're to discuss it at all would be to
describe the underlying problem, point to needed solutions and avenues
of arrival, rather than to carp at the symptoms. What giant steps could
we take if we were adequately informed? The effort seems absolutely
crucial though daunting from here, but we certainly don't know enough to
throw out generalizations that imply an innate failing.
This morning I watched on Democracy Now! an excellent round table
discussion of what is without doubt THE most important aspect of
maintaining any level of informed public discourse, the news media. For
those who missed it (it's worth looking at online), the discussion by
four people versed in their subject covered the decline in circulation
and advertising revenue, media concentration in a regime of capital
accumulation, cuts in newspaper staff which further shrink investigative
reporting of local, national and international events, and the prospects
for the internet as a medium capable of filling the information gap.
With some hopeful qualifications, the internet was seen as primarily
parasitic on the news wires, and the main impediment was obviously
funding the arduous, time-consuming, labor-intensive legwork required
(as well, I would add, as facilitating accountability, credibility and
well-moderated active participation and follow-on activity).
The news media are only gaining 10% of their revenue from their online
news services, and while the average time spent reading the newsprint
editions was estimated at 45 minutes, the average time spent reading
news online was reported to be only 7 minutes. The alternative of
employee or journeyman journalist owned and operated papers was
discussed, but only as a stopgap: also and more appropriately a BBC-type
public tax-supported subsidization was mentioned; but the track record
of the BBC, without public input and greater accountability, is not an
especially emulable model. In any event, the future of the newsprint
media was portrayed as bleak for the longer term.
We act on what we know, and if we act other than in our interest, short
or long term, that's tragic and self-defeating but certainly not
moronic, in any clinical sense of the term. I have over the years read
McLuhan, Bagdikian, McChesney, Chomsky, Edward Herman, Stuart Ewen, Sut
Jhally and others on media and communications problems, and this
discussion adds to and piles onto what I have read.
How do we retain any sense of our collective strength and unity, or of
the larger picture that is not part of our individual experience, the
theory and strategy applicable, the priorities mandated and the forms of
organization necessary? Without this essential linking, dependent on
information the adequacy and quality of which is constrained by the
imperatives of the enemy system, we continue to stagger along as
atomized, ineffectual beings.
Ralph
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