How the media polarized us
We’ve certainly become more polarized in recent years, and the MSM has certainly played a large role.
This article advances a theory as to why:
Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.
It probably had a role in worsening and reinforcing the situation. But it did not cause it. I recall the problem being quite bad much earlier in time. It predated even Watergate, but Watergate gave the media the idea that it was composed of warriors fighting for the cause of righteousness against evil, and reporting became “journalism” and attracted more people from the left who’d never served much of an apprenticeship in life prior to entering the profession – which became a “profession” as opposed to a job.
I agree that the polarization is old. One need only read Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead” to get a suggestion that media manipulation to divide people has been going on for a long time. Conversely, media has had a long history of also uniting when it is intended to be used that way, read “The Federalist Papers”.
Going on forty years ago, I used to go around with the Detroit Free Press about some of their offenses. Is that before the change?
It cannot be overstated how many of our current problems are either directly or indirectly related to the 2008-2010 recession.
The best example is the woke generation. When the old system is deemed to be rigged or unfair then the natural move is to find different systems to replace them and sadly those are often times even more destructive for the individual and society at large.
I finally gave up getting a paper when the current subscription ran out. The paper had been sold to USA Today so it became less a local paper than a national paper.
I still look at the online edition since I can access 3 free articles a day. I might subscribe to the digital edition if the price goes down during college football season. Maybe…
That’s part of it, but not the whole story.
The Left has become so crazy, extreme, radical and hateful that it is clear that we conservatives have very little in common with them.
The Green New Deal would bankrupt American and really hurt the poor. The main beneficiaries are China and the people and corporations that benefit from federal tax credits. This is the most insane thing I have seen in my life. Much worse that Vietnam or 9/11.
How can we agree with the Left about mutilating kids who think they want to change genders?
My brother in CA is a complete opponent to the Second Amendment. Turns out that the people in China and Hong Kong would like a Second Amendment now.
When I see the loons on CNN and MSNBC rant and rave, I don’t want to have anything to do with them. They are so, so dishonest that it is simply unwatchable.
When one considers the yellow journalism from the early days of this country, one could argue the standards were much worse – at least when it came to publishing flagrant lies and scandalous assertions that had no basis in fact. At least today there are defamation laws that can result in the business being gutted and shuttered, as in the Hulk Hogan case against Gawker.
The online world has changed all this, obviously. Now so much published information is out there, across a spectrum of amateur-to-industrial journalism, that consuming it almost becomes an exercise in fitness – you have to keep up in order to separate out the phony from the genuine.
I’m not sure I agree with this theory of transition though, as the cause of our polarization. I think the real story is more insidious than that. Today’s information merchants are the robber barons of this age, nothing more. Like the old robber barons, they possess tremendous political influence. But the proletariat of old figured out how to de-couple their influence, and I believe it will happen in this case too, once the political will is there.
We lived in Boulder, CO from 1978 to 1986. It was already a place rife with trust fund liberals. There was a heavy spring snow, and the city didn’t plow the main street leading out of our neighborhood. I couldn’t get out to get to Stapleton Airport in Denver. My flight had to be covered by a reserve who was able to get to the airport. My wages were docked, and I got an a**chewing from my flight manager. I called the city to complain. Their answer? “Use cross country skis to get to work.” When I explained that I worked at Stapleton, they opined, “If you have to get to work, you shouldn’t be living in Boulder.” That was the day I decided to leave Boulder.
The attitude that was prevalent then among enclaves of the “elite” is out in the open in spades today. And much more widespread. Every nutty thing you see is driven by people who have never done a lick of manual labor, carpentry, wiring, cement laying, farming, or any of the things that keep this country operating. Most have never had to wonder how they were going to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, pay a medical bill, or had any financial worries that are common among the country class. These are people who live in a theoretical world that in their minds looks a lot like the socialist dream. They never recognize that the dream, when actually tried, becomes a nightmare for most of the population. The experiments have all been run before – East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Red China and Taiwan, Chile under Allende versus Chile under Pinochet, and so on. The “science” is settled. We know socialism/communism doesn’t work.
One need only read Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead” to get a suggestion that media manipulation to divide people has been going on for a long time.
–Leland
A bit OT but worth considering in the “how far we haven’t come” sense…
I encourage people to watch the 1949 film adaption of “The Fountainhead” with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. These days Rand is considered a dangerous far-right cult figure / lunatic. (Granted, there are some iffy things about Rand.)
However Warner Brothers gave “The Fountainhead” first-class treatment all the way. Big stars, big budget, even a glorious Max “Casablanca” Steiner music score. They agreed to let Rand write the screenplay and not change a line of dialog. The film was near-reverential to Rand’s views, which were clearly anti-communist, although there was plenty of communist sympathy in Hollywood then.
It’s the film most true to the book I can think of. It’s quite a film experience too. Astonishing. Watching it now is like seeing a film from an alternate history.
There have always been partisan outlets (what were the political leanings of all the papers called something ‘Democrat’ or Republican’) but it used to be more open and not as prevalent in the ‘news’ sections.
I thought it was well done, as well but frank lloyd wright, is clearly the apple of rand’s eye, ellsworth toohey is a standin for all these liberal intellectuals like krugman, or his counterparts at the Post and Gannett, its foremost about the individual and his desire to explore ideas not encumbered by the past, so she might have more common cause with some liberal philosophies,
now Atlas Shrugged which I only saw the first installment, was more dogmatic in style, under the placid exterior of the 50s, he could see the forces of statism and collectivism rising the campaign against Hank Rearden can be precursor of the two minute hate against Musk,
The cause of polarization? It’s fair to blame the media for much of it, but clearly there are also other causes. The catch phrase is “causal density.” Long ago, during my first tour of duty in college, I majored in history and decided that good answers to this kind of question are hard to come by.
If I’m forced to estimate the significance of causes for complex phenomena, I start by making a top ten list. Then I arrange the ten causes in order of importance. Then I force myself to explain my ranking. Then, if necessary, I re-rank. Then, for each cause, I assign a number from one to ten. Each number rates the importance of the cause relative to its nearest neighbors on my list. Then I force myself to explain that number.
This kind of pseudo-quantitative ranking forces me to be both analytical and modest. Its slow and tedious, so I don’t do it very often, and I rarely take the last step, which is rewriting it all into a coherent narrative. At this point, who’d want to read it?
For what it’s worth, for anybody who’s curious, if I were to start a systematic look at the causes of polarization, I’d put university education at number one. What a sordid victory. At this point, there’s very little worth saving. Outside of a few practical fields like engineering and medicine, why should taxpayers be forced to fund university programs that are eagerly destroying society? Of particular importance is the cynical, rapid, and recent demise of the sciences. That tragedy will be felt for generations.
In the old days doctor and dentist offices used to have stacks of weekly magazines, some months old. I remember going through them and looking at 6+ month old issues to see how well their coverage was in hindsight.
Time magazine was the worst, getting most things wrong. Newsweek was so-so and U.S. News and World report was the best.
The bias has always been there, it was just harder to track their record back in the day. I imagine if there were YouTube videos of the old news broadcasts, we would see much more of the bias.,
I’ll second Cornflour’s placing a good portion of the blame on the degradation of higher ed.
A century ago, big business largely ran the country, with political and union bosses also exercising power. In those days, “talking truth to power” was a possibility for journalists, though if it meant bitter fights with publishers. What happened was that a new network of activists and interest groups and foundations and non-profits and ideological movements got a large share of power in the country, at the same time as college graduates who shared the ideology of the new political forces took over journalism. The journalists are on the same side as progressive groups because they came out of the same elite colleges and universities, so they don’t question or challenge progressive dogma.
Midcentury journalists tended to be liberal, but they had more contact with people of different views. They weren’t living in so self-contained an ideological bubble, so they weren’t so dogmatic in their views. They’d been in the military. They went to state colleges or learned on the job. I can well believe that reliance on advertising revenues also played a role in constraining reporters who were already more tolerant in those days than they are now.
Re: University education
Cornflour, physicsguy:
Yes, I’m on-board with universities as amplifiers of the most destructive intellectual influences and that being a key, if not the key, factor in how we got to this particular ledge.
Universities are like the San Francisco bathhouses when AIDS started hitting.
@ Cornflour > “if I were to start a systematic look at the causes of polarization, I’d put university education at number one.”
Which raises the question: how did the universities become so uniformly biased in a single direction?
This post about a (yet another) professor throwing in the towel explains a plausible mechanism:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/07/22/professor-quits-over-woke-curriculum-takeover-n2610630
After a certain point, the leftists become a self-perpetuating super-majority, sometimes reaching complete dominance – they never hire a conservative academic to achieve balance, inclusion, or equity.
This still leaves open the question of why then-conservatives went along with cancelling their own side, but “lying about their beliefs” probably had something to do with it, and in the earlier days you couldn’t check out your applicants on social media or readily review any of their personal life. If their publications history wasn’t too egregious, they were probably considered okay. Also, the full extent of the Gramscian March was, IMO, unsuspected or discounted on the Right, if anyone even knew it existed.
I do wonder how the leftists were so adept in knowing their own kind.
Just watched this Prager U video of a young woman destroyed by Harvard into an angry feminist. But here time writing for a couple unnamed media companies, and what they assigned is informative. It was all designed for clicks and views. She got exposed to the otherside and awoke from being Woke.
But always keep in mind, both sides, write to get attention and that is polarizing as the way they get clicks is via anger and outrage
https://youtu.be/DRvjcOQA6-w?t=231
Media polarization suggests the NYT 1619 Project as a good example.
I haven’t seen much about Dr. Carson lately, but this indicates he is still actively promoting the principles he so eloquently defended in his 2016 candidacy (and I would have happily voted for him).
https://www.breitbart.com/education/2022/07/29/exclusive-ben-carson-launches-free-k-5-curriculum-schools-parents-rejecting-racial-ethnic-agitprop/
Along with Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas, he is one of the outstanding people who never seem to be included by the Left in their lists of Black celebrities.
JJ,
“Every nutty thing you see is driven by people who have never done a lick of manual labor, carpentry, wiring, cement laying, farming, or any of the things that keep this country operating. Most have never had to wonder how they were going to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, pay a medical bill, or had any financial worries that are common among the country class. These are people who live in a theoretical world that in their minds looks a lot like the socialist dream. They never recognize that the dream, when actually tried, becomes a nightmare for most of the population.”
It is the people who do the manual labor, carpentry, wiring, cement laying, farming and the other things that keep this country operating, that allow the people who are living in a theoretical world to engage in their civilization destroying activities. They are people sitting out on a tree limb high above the ground busily cutting off the limb upon which they opine.
People can do manual labor, skilled trades, hard sciences, business and still be leftists. Evil is present in all.
True but the percentage of people in the manual trades who are in favor of letist ‘solutions’ are far, far less than those in white collar jobs. And a substantial percentage of the people in the manual trades who vote democrat, do so out of ignorance.
ellsworth toohey is a standin for all these liberal intellectuals like krugman, or his counterparts at the Post and Gannett…
miguel cervantes:
I’ve never run into this elsewhere, but in my mind I always hear “Ellsworth Toohey” as “Ellsworth Ptui”. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were Ayn Rand’s intent.
I would put the J schools as #1 in the blame for news media being clueless. The days when the reporter started as a copy boy or a gofor went away with Watergate. It glamorized the newspaper reporter as a hero and, incidentally, as an intellectual. Journalism became a “profession” and was ranked up there with philanthropy. William Butterworth (WEB Griffin) had a series of novels set in the 1970s with one character a newspaperman. The newspaperman was a police reporter who was a high school dropout. Those days are gone and we worse off.
“…people who have never done a lick of manual labor…” etc
Covid really brought this out. Some very large number of people, and more influential even than their numbers, saw the whole lockdown thing as just a matter of staying at home, possibly working remotely, ordering things from Amazon, having food delivered, watching Netflix and others, and so on. How it came to be that all the infrastructure making that possible–not just the luxuries, but power and water and such–continued to operate more or less seamlessly did not seem to cross their minds at all.
The sheer obliviousness of it…. And it really made me think of some sci-fi novel I read long ago which emphasized the idea that a soft spoiled people is naturally seen as prey by predators.
Mark Levin’s Unfreedom of the Press illustrates that American journalism has been polarizing from day one. (For all I know, that may be true of the journalism in other countries, too.)
I terminated my subscriptions to, and stopped reading, both the NY Times and the LA Times during the Clinton presidency. Both publications had become obvious Clinton shills and irrationally anti-Israel.
The useful arts (manual trades) have the advantage of objective truth
“The reason of this is that, being automatic, they [the prevailing methods of education] lead neither to the discovery of truth nor to the detection of error. It is easy to juggle with words, to argue in a circle, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to reach false conclusions which wear a plausible aspect. But it is not so with things. If a cylinder is not tight the steam engine is a lifeless mass of iron of no value whatsoever. A flaw in the wheel of the locomotive wrecks the train. Through a defective flue in the chimney the house is set on fire. A lie in the concreted is always hideous; like murder, it will out. Hence it is that the mind is liable to fall into grave errors until it is fortified by the wise counsel of the practical hand.”
—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900)
Measure twice, cut once.
–Carpenter’s Proverb
______________________
There’s a whole philosophy of life in there.
@ Geoffrey > “And a substantial percentage of the people in the manual trades who vote democrat, do so out of ignorance.”
And out of habits formed when the Democrats were only stealth socialists instead of flaming Marxists.
But some of them are wising up, especially Hispanics.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/07/hispanic-voters-on-the-move.php
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/26/exclusive-sen-ted-cruz-on-hispanics-shifting-to-gop-democrats-are-openly-racist/
Teixeira has now joined the Reagan team: “I didn’t leave the Democrat party, the party left me.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/15/capital-city-ruy-teixeira-american-enterprise-institute-00045819
Also: Check out Salena Zito’s recent post; she is good about going directly to the people instead of the academics (although I have some quibbles about some of her views).
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/its-the-uncertainty-stupid
The Democrats are NOT clueless; they are enacting a long-held agenda with malice aforethought.
Biden’s behavior is not puzzling at all. As Neo has often noted, he has never been anything but a lying callous grifter, with a façade that voters willingly accepted for whatever reason (IMO, he should have been dumped by the party after his first plagiarism event; that he wasn’t told you a LOT about the Democrats right then).
He simply no longer has the mental control to cover up his true self.
Zito may know this (how could she not?), but I think she is loath to admit the depths to which the Democrat party has sunk.
According to her bio and professional vitae, she may be one of the few genuine centrists in the journalistic field.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/author/salena-zito
https://www.marathi.tv/political-analyst/salena-zito/
Interestingly to me, she has no article at Wikipedia, although she is more prominent than many of their subjects. Perhaps they don’t want people reading her posts.
Media polarizes everything because that’s what Democrats do.
https://babylonbee.com/news/congressional-democrats-quickly-redefine-meaning-of-loss-after-losing-baseball-game-to-republicans-10-0
I’m catching up my reading after two weeks off, and am now perusing Sarah Hoyt’s blog posts.
This one seems relevant here.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/07/14/the-insanity-is-not-new/
I’m still on Facebook and I’m generally pretty closeted on Facebook. I have Facebook friends that are people I’ve known for decades among whom are dedicated leftists. They think of themselves as “liberal.” Almost all of them are potentially intelligent people, but they only read things that either prop up their egos as “intelligent people” or things that confirm their biases.
Occasionally, I forget who can read what and I wrote something that blows my cover, and one of them will unfriend me.
I find that sad — sad that they want to be so insular that they have to block out any thing that didn’t echo their sentiments. I’ll hide a post a find annoying, or snooze someone for thirty days, but I rarely unfriend over political crap.
Partly because I think reading what the write helps me understand their idiocy, and I think partly because I harbor the illusion that someday I will be able to open their eyes.
I know that that’s unlikely but… I knew them a long time ago; we were friends then; we were friends for reasons totally unrelated to politics; I woke up and smelled the coffee; I’m intelligent and so are they — maybe there is a chance that they will wake up and smell the coffee.
So…
Most of them live in either coastal California or NYC. A handful are from “flyover country.” Some are really wealthy, but most aren’t and are regular shmos trying to make a living. I’ll see them post something may about “Trumpsters.” They loved Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (I did get unfriended for putting out that the beloved RBG thought Roe v. Wade should be struck down. I kind of thought I might.) They think Kavanaugh is a sexual predator. They stay mum on Biden, but Obama was brilliant.
But there area few who I think have potential for opening their eyes. They’re “nice” people who are kind and try to do right. They attend church or synagogue regularly. I think they’re fans of Obama because they think it’s the “nice” thing to do more than actually agreeing with him. They’re the ones I think if I can figure it out, I might be able to get them to wake up and smell the coffee.
People went into journalism “to make a difference”.
They didn’t become journalists to tell the truth. They don’t see the honest truth as something valuable to society.
Most journalists are stupid. Seriously. Certainly true of those I’ve dealt with personally. There is a strong correlation between logic and math. Lots of students choose journalism because “I was told there’d be no math on this test.”
Michael Chrichton’s speech “Why Speculate?” Is a must read. Especially the Gell-Mann bit.
Trump’s accomplishments are many and significant. His most impactful was exposing the corruption and incompetence of the MSM. That exposure will do more good for America and the world over the next few decades than anything else he could have done.
But the media is only part of the problem of polarization. The essential problem is the Left’s relentless assault on America and Americans and the evil tactics and strategy they employ in that attack.
Krauthammer nailed it two decades ago. Unfortunately, ordinary Americans are just now beginning to realize that the Left not only considers us evil, but also intends to destroy us and our Constitutional form of government.
Polarization isn’t the problem in the USA. Just as it isn’t Ukraine’s problem or Israel’s. An enemy is seeking to destroy those two nations. Fighting back is the appropriate response. An enemy is seeking to destroy us. The problem isn’t that people are polarized. It’s that half of them don’t yet fully understand they under assault.
Regarding JJ’s excellent point about the difference in our culture between the working class and the elites (or whatever you want to call the groups) (and yes, there are some exceptions but I think it’s fundamentally accurate):
The day after the election, the media was so giddy about the result they had been wishing for I found it sickening. I went to the hardware store to get something I needed. The hardware store we go to is in a nearby town that is solidly working-class, and of course the people who go to hardware stores are generally people who work. The TV was on and in contrast to the giddy media, among the people in the store there was a strong sense of sorrow and foreboding. The contrast was palpable. It was strangely pleasing, this sense of shared emotion, even though the emotion was so negative.
The first time I talked to a certain liberal friend after the election she started to say something fairly mild about how wonderful it all was and I stopped her and said there was something she needed to understand. I told her we shouldn’t talk about Biden, because I was extremely upset and angry about the election. The way I explained it was, “the way you felt about the president for the past four years, that’s the way I feel about this president.” She was shocked. I don’t think she had any idea why I would feel that way, although she accepted it. But then this is someone who admits she gets most of her news from the Today show. I wonder what she thinks now. But as I said here the other day, I’m afraid to ask.
One polarization factor I haven’t seen mentioned yet is post-modernism. You can sum that up as a war on reality, the notion that reality is subjective, everything is a construct of our minds, etc. People who live in a comfortable dream world can swallow this. People who work in the real world of nuts and bolts understand that nuts and bolts are real and dreams are not. It seems to me that these two views of reality have been in the mix for quite a while, in an invisible way, eating away at our common understanding.
Was in a discussion group recently. Couple of things I noted. When it was mentioned, after a suitable degree of self-righteous pleasure in the reports of DJT trying to drive the Secret Service car, that the Service had people prepared to testify under oath that it hadn’t happened…the folks were disappointed.
There is no dealing with these people. They cannot be convinced. Not the slightest doubt can be introduced. At worst, something like the SS car issue becomes a non-issue and nothing is learned, not about being careful with the news, not about not believing what is most satisfying despite its near-impossibility.
I was unfriended a couple of years ago by pointing out that gender-confused people had not been exploding messily on the streets while trying to figure out which restroom to use. Hence, making difficult and potentially hazardous–see Loudoun County schools–accomodations is not necessary. Might as well have been literally Hitler.
Failed to lament the fate of women when Trump was elected…unfriended by a woman I’d known in college who’d married a fraternity brother and been a particular friend of my late brother (SEA Oct 70).
Whatever we know about psychology, we have not plumbed the astonishing power of mechanisms defending loved beliefs against reality. And one of those beliefs is the absolute righteousness of all the other beliefs.
I think it was Sowell who said you can’t very well argue against the ignorance of someone whose moral righteousness depends on that ignorance.
I don’t think it’s a waste of time to try to inflict reality on such folks, but to make a difference requires something else. No idea what.
AesopFan: At every turn, Biden has failed to look voters in the eye and tell them he feels their pain. He spends most of the time either blaming someone else or denying that the pain exists at all. It’s all in your head.
Or tells them that the pain is necessary for the “greater good”, as determined by the “experts”.
Applied to every issue from EVs to WuFlu … we are expected to defer to them as omniscient and infallible and incapable of evil.
And millions of our neighbors are peachy-keen with that, for they have been led to believe that their common-sense insights are ALWAYS inferior to those society puts on pedestals on the basis of surface appearances like credentials and cultural popularity,
OTOH Geoffrey and JK … those in the manual trades have their thinking tested against objective reality, with consequences imposed on the basis of that test. They can’t wallow in flawed theories with impunity, the way politicians, bureaucrats, academics, activists – and those who accept them as “authoritative” and beyond the need to question – can.
At least until What Can’t Go On, Won’t™.
Sarah Rolph:
‘
Post-modernism has made things even worse and crazier, no doubt.
I would add that the contempt verging on hate for the middle and working classes has been a feature of the intellectual and artistic classes going back a full century, likely more.
I’ll look up the quote when I get home, but I recall a small, but important poetry magazine of the 1930s directly declaring war on all things middle-class.
These days poetry is 99% leftist/progressive.
The media are an aspect of our problem, but only one, and I suspect the media are less influential than they have been in a century. The most neuralgic problems we’re facing are being perpetrated by school administrators and schoolteachers, replicating nefarious activity in higher education. The teachers and administrators are the issue of the ed faculties. There are some particularly repellent redoubts in academe, although all of it has been corrupted. In the arts and sciences faculties, the worst are the victimology programs followed by sociology, cultural anthropology, and American history. Among the occupational schools, the worst are those for teacher-training, social work, and library administration. However, as a rule in higher ed, the administrators supervising the faculty and the student affairs apparat are the worst. If schools had conscientious trustees, this would not be happening. We do not have conscientious trustees. Some of that is a function of the institutional architecture and some of the declining moral quality of the professional-managerial stratum in this country.
These days poetry is 99% leftist/progressive.
Remember Norman Maclean? (A River Runs through It). One of his vignettes was being taught to scan poetry by his mother at the kitchen table. He hadn’t learned it in the high schools of the towns in which they’d lived (in Montana, ca. 1918). His mother had an ordinary upbringing on the Canadian prairie. She’d learned to scan poetry and thought he needed to know. For people with a certain quantum of education a century ago, poetry mattered. Poetry may be leftist progressive, but no one gives a rip about it outside of literature faculties.
Failed to lament the fate of women when Trump was elected…unfriended by a woman I’d known in college who’d married a fraternity brother and been a particular friend of my late brother (SEA Oct 70).
Of course, nothing has happened to women-qua-women in the last seven years. The most disagreeable things which happen to women-qua-women are criminal violence of a certain sort, deadbeat baby daddies, having papers served on you in a divorce suit, crossing paths as a juvenile with a pedo, and having an unscrupulous boss who wants into your pants. No clue why you’d expect having Donald Trump in the president’s chair would make any of this menu of social problems appreciably worse, unless its your contention that Trump’s vulgarity in private conversation will embolden others. (These problems were less frequent in the world in which my mother came of age, when ‘feminism’ was at a low ebb).
Art Deco:
What a tiresome, patronizing manner of conversation you have, if that is what you are doing.
I still give a rip about poetry, though I am far from any literature faculty. In fact my cultural adventure this weekend is immersing myself in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Being retired and having gained some patience with age, I can now approach this complex, iconic poem. There is much good material on the web and YouTube. Jeffrey Perl’s “Literary Modernism” lecture 4 from “The Great Courses” is a marvel. I knew the poem was bleak, but I didn’t realize how deeply so.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/literary-modernism-the-struggle-for-modern-history
That Latin/Greek epigraph which leads the poem (and completely put me off Eliot when I tried to read the poem in high school) is from Petronius. The Sibyl, whom Apollo has granted immortality, but not youth, is asked what she wants and she replies, “I want to die.”
Perl claims that here Eliot allows the Mind of Europe to speak.
Diversity [dogma], em-pathetic appeals, handmade tales, and steering [engines].
Failed to lament the fate of women
Casting couches, friendship with “benefits”, elective abortion to hide the “burden”… body of evidence, social progress (e.g. rape… rape-rape of ten year-old girls) without borders, an ethical religion that denies her, his, our dignity and agency, and a VP who took a knee, begged for her progress… raised the glass ceiling, and colored it opaque, for women, and, since the establishment of political congruence (“=”), for men, too.
Art Deco. Missed the point wrt my unfriending. Of course it’s nonsense. But that ‘s the point. It’s nonsense and they believe it.
Sarah Rolph:
At least she’s still talking to you.
Stan:
They may be stupid about some things, but they are NOT stupid about the use of words as propaganda. Most of the MSM articles are very carefully crafted to be mendacious without technically lying, and I’ve been impressed at the skill involved.
huxley: ‘”The Sibyl, whom Apollo has granted immortality, but not youth, is asked what she wants and she replies, “I want to die.”’
I figure there’s a good chance you are or were a Zappa fan. You may remember a little graphic that appeared on one of the Mothers’ albums: a sketch of a tree with the caption “This tree is ugly and it wants to die.” For some reason it stuck in my mind, and I often think “This culture is ugly and it wants to die.”
Struldbrugs, in Swift’s Gulliver, ch. X.
What a tiresome, patronizing manner of conversation you have, if that is what you are doing.
Cry me a river.
I still give a rip about poetry, though I am far from any literature faculty. In fact my cultural adventure this weekend is immersing myself in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
It’s a niche taste. Acknowledging that bothers you.
Art Deco. Missed the point wrt my unfriending.
No, I didn’t.
Mac:
Oh, yeah, I am a Zappa fan! Though not hard-core. That’s another level. I would dearly love to hear what Frank would say today, were he around.
I believe you read his tree quote correctly.
My favorite Z quotes:
When someone in a concert audience complained that the security people were in uniforms, Zappa retorted:
_______________________________
Everybody in here is wearing a uniform. Don’t kid yourselves.
_______________________________
When I was young, that was a moment of clarity for me. Then there was:
_______________________________
Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.
_______________________________
Zappa was an iconoclast, but he knew he stood on the shoulders of giants.
I would put the J schools as #1 in the blame for news media being clueless. The days when the reporter started as a copy boy or a gofor went away with Watergate.
Schools of journalism have existed for some time. Wm. Manchester attended one just after the war. So did Nancy Kulp (aka “Miss Jane Hathaway”), who was a newspaper reporter before she fell into acting in the early 1950s. Not sure what share of reporters in each age have had j-school degrees. I know some luminaries from a generation ago (Nina Totenberg, Linda Ellerbee, and Carl Bernstein) had no j-school credential and no college degree.
But that ‘s the point. It’s nonsense and they believe it.
Richard, perhaps you should ask them this … how can the “experts” and “leaders” you put so much trust in, ever know YOU well enough to get the answers right for YOU from the top down?
Ask them – nicely – to defend that as true and logical.
Then point out this: “You expect your government to be your caretaker in all areas, instead of focused on keeping you free so you can take care of yourselves and your neighbors. That is why things are not working.”
Because the caretaker paradigm effectively unplugs most of the distributed intellect – the part that is closest to the problem and has to live with the solution and its side effects – from the process of solving problems.
The conservative/libertarian world view is characterized as selfish by its opponents, because it refuses to jump to the easy pseudo solution of top-down mandate/subsidy. But it leads people into a complacency that makes them vulnerable to the failures of others.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.
Art Deco:
It’s all ipse dixit with you. However, saying something, however emphatically, doesn’t make it so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipse_dixit
You can cry me a river. I don’t care. I may or may not bother to respond to your inevitable future rudenesses in kind, but consider it a possibility.
I may or may not bother to respond to your inevitable future rudenesses in kind,
Huxley, there is one common element to all your dissatisfying relationships.
The conservative/libertarian world view is characterized as selfish by its opponents, because it refuses to jump to the easy pseudo solution of top-down mandate/subsidy. But it leads people into a complacency that makes them vulnerable to the failures of others.
Some years ago, Ann Coulter thought she’d run for Congress as a Libertarian, in an effort to take out Christopher Shays, her congressman and the most liberal Republican in Congress. She met with the local Libertarian committee. It didn’t go well. “I discovered the only thing they gave a damn about were the drug laws”. Then there’s characters like Bryan Caplan of the Mercatus Center. Caplan inspired Steve Sailer’s summary of libertarianism: “applied autism”. Libertarians are adept at inviting rude characterizations.
Art Deco; huxley:
I don’t want to have to referee this, but please stop the more personal stuff.
Art Deco:
I believe I’ve read that a much higher percentage of reporters have j-school degrees now than in the past.
Good point about Post Modernism, Sarah. If we keep their thesis in mind that all is subjective, it explains a lot.
I don’t know when the elites began hating the working class. Where I grew up, Estes Par, CO, we had a summer population of wealthy people with summer homes there. My mother was the person the wives patronized to get their hair done. As a result, I met many very Wealthy people such as the Gaylords, the Pews, the Livingstones, F. O. Stanley, the Magoffins, and many others. Those people were nice to our family, showed real trust and interest in my mother and her business. She was often invited to social gatherings and even asked to host events for them at various times. I never sensed any attitude of superiority or distaste because we were working class. Some of these people came from humble beginnings and knew how the world operated, but even those that had inherited riches still seemed grounded in reality. That was in the 1930s and 40s. Maybe the Depression explains a bit of it.
It seems to me that a lot of the wealthy elites who had not necessarily worked to earn their wealth sprung up in the 1960s. Prosperity was growing, post WWII and many fortunes were beginning to pas to heirs as trusts. I met a few trust fund liberals on college campuses when I was recruiting in 1967 and became even more aware of such people when we moved to Boulder in 1978. The numbers have increased as the country has become wealthier.
If you have never worked a menial job or been a part of an organization that builds/produces useful things, and your life has been mainly one of theory and ideas, it could be difficult to grasp how important the working class is to the country. Still, it’s a mystery to me how people can be so unaware of what is happening all around them.
There have always been people who want to feel superior to others. Usually, such people have inferiority feelings or take some pleasure in being mean to others. That such traits have become part of a political movement may be due to mass communications and the bias therein.
Art, Big-L Libertarians give us small-l types … who value liberty over ideology but are not so open-minded that our brains leak out and vote for the Big-L’s … a bad name.
JJ … it’s not just wanting to feel superior.
Those who are part of the societal and/or political elites are all-in invested in their elite status – financially, professionally, politically, even in terms of reputation and their own self-esteem. They have built their ENTIRE lives around being perceived as the elite.
But this perceived value depends upon US continually needing … and therefore deferring to … them and their “superior” guidance. Hence the motivation to encourage its imposition as The One True Way in every area, through both social pressure and in some cases the coercive force of law.
Donald Trump, in word and in policy, dissented from that paradigm. His policies instead expanded respect for and protection of individual liberty – including the liberty to depart from that One True Way when it doesn’t work for us as individuals.
That erodes the perceived value of elite status in this society. Which is why the elites were motivated to the point of collusion, to tear him down.
neo, yes, that’s something to be thankful for. And we’re still good friends, we just have to put politics aside completely.
It used to be no big deal to just wall off that topic, but these days I do feel at least a little bit alienated from my friends who have such a different world view.
Jester Naylor: “Those who are part of the societal and/or political elites are all-in invested in their elite status – financially, professionally, politically, even in terms of reputation and their own self-esteem. They have built their ENTIRE lives around being perceived as the elite.”
Wow, that’s quite a description. I have known only a handful of people in my life that would fit that description. Of course, I don’t and wouldn’t mingle in such circles – even if I could.
It has always been pretty obvious that John Kerry and Al Gore fit that description quite well. I didn’t realize there were so many a**holes in the world.
JJ, I would assert that description extends to almost every Federal employee in DC … from lower-level staffers/bureaucrats/functionaries like Vindman and Strozk, through the Kerrys and Gores and Congress and Cabinet, right up to the current Big Guy himself.
That drives them to think that they are the people who really run the country, and are insubordinate when an “inferior” is elected to oversee them … or when ordinary people hold them to account for not doing their legitimate job: securing our rights, instead of running roughshod over those rights in the name of their vision of the “common good”.
It is also what drives the pursuit of indicators of their elite status – from getting a cramped office in the WH versus a larger one elsewhere, to the focus on titles you see from “Dr.” Jill (D-Taco).
Jester. To ask those I know that sort of question would be fruitless. They glory in unquestioned compliance. The Order of the day is Science and to question it removes any reason to make people do stupid stuff.
When the Science. from above changes, it disappears retroactively, except anyone mentioning it is subversive.
You presume these people think rationally. They do not. They support the thinking necessary to feel superior to the rest of us. And to have a God-like regime in charge.
Remember the ads about “Why did you get vaccinated?” They did not happen, citizen.
Huxley: I still give a rip about poetry too, and not in a professional/academic capacity. Philip Larkin’s collected poems usually makes it into my briefcase when I travel. Or Richard Wilbur’s. Or Frost’s. I like to remind myself that another world existed not too long ago.
Trad poetry is still being written. We discussed Dana Gioia on this forum a while back. Check out A. M. Juster’s (real name: Michael J. Astrue) work: https://www.amjuster.net/. Interesting factoid: Astrue was a government bureaucrat (commissioner of the Social Security Administration, 2007-2013).
Deco: you’re probably right about poetry being a niche taste, although you might be surprised by some of the places where it still pops up.
“…Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”
(Larkin, “Church Going”)
from lower-level staffers/bureaucrats/functionaries like Vindman and Strozk, through the Kerrys and Gores and Congress and Cabinet, right up to the current Big Guy himself.
Vindman and Sztrok were high-level functionaries.
Richard, when they* are enduring the consequences of the policies and people that they supported, sooner or later asking that question will have them realizing that they are living in a state of cognitive dissonance that is making them look like fools.
And they don’t like looking like fools.
*Ordinary people will come around to this faster, compared to those who have invested heavily in the pursuit of elite status. The latter may not come around until they are overtaken by events and their investment becomes worthless.
Art, the way I see things, Vindman, Strozk and their ilk weren’t high enough to be perceived and respected as policy/decision-makers by the rest of us. We perceived them only when others pulled them into the public spotlight.
That is my definition of “low-level”. Low enough that their positions couldn’t honestly cash the checks their egos were writing.
It has always been pretty obvious that John Kerry and Al Gore fit that description quite well. I didn’t realize there were so many a**holes in the world.
Around about 1985, Michael Kinsley offered that in Washington, an official’s reputation tends to expand – like a gas – to fill whatever office he occupies. That’s John Kerry. Kerry is notable, like all members of Congress, at being able to run fundraising and publicity campaigns. However, he’s a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts. Democratic Senators in Massachusetts have, since the end of the Great War, been re-elected > 90% of the time (while Republican Senators are returned to office about 50% of the time). He won a tough primary elections in 1982 and 1984; none of his subsequent campaigns were challenging and three of them were walks. Prior to getting elected Lt. Governor on a ticket with Michael Dukakis, he practiced law in a two-lawyer firm. His partner (who was also his sometime girlfriend) eventually quit practicing when she landed a judicial appointment. Prior to that, he’d been employed in the district attorney’s office. His duties were largely administrative and the DA got tired of him after a while and fired him. Prior to that, he was a student at BC law school; not one of the more capable it emerged when his transcript leaked. Prior to that he was in the Navy, on active duty for three years. Not much wrong with his Navy service that should interest anyone. It’s just that he built his entire public persona on those three years – more precisely, on a four month combat posting to the Mekong Delta. He was awarded a mess of metals for unimportant things and sent home early. I’ve known a few combat veterans. They didn’t make much of it. My mother’s observation of her contemporaries who’d been in combat (WWii and Korea) was that they’d start to tell a story and then come to a dead stop in the middle of it. Kerry made use of his boatmates as campaign props.
So, who is John Kerry? Well, there are people who know him who think well of him and people who do not. To the rest of us, he’s a high class blowhard, a mediocre lawyer, and has an astonishing nose for women with eight-figure sums of money behind them.
As for Al Gore, he’s the beneficiary of one of the odder features of American politics – brand loyalty. He was a newspaper reporter and serial grad school dropout who got elected to Congress as his father had previously represented that district. It was his association with Bilge Clinton that cost him his reputation in Tennessee. He’s gotten very wealthy since his retirement from politics, benefiting from the willingness of businessmen in regulated sectors to make the actuarial calculation that their target pol might one day be able to do them a favor.
They have six children between them, all of whom had a tony education, and, one might surmise, benefited from the starfu*ker tendency among college admissions officers. One of the six is impressive.
gore is his own lord fauntleroy, but kerry has been a traitor in south asia in central america, and the middle east, most recently with iran,
recall the winter soldiers were pushing dezinforma like war crimes, the action arm was part of an insurrectionary plot to asssasinate senators like stennis, gerald nicosia pointed that part out, then all his papers were stolen,
in central america he was a tool of the sandinistas, spreading any lie, he was cooperating with the christics, that gary webb took the ball and ran with, preventing the work of rick prado with the nicaraguan resistance, who had to fight with a shoe string budget, not the tens of billions we are lavishing on the ukraine,
similarly in afghanistan and iraq, he carried taliban and al queda propaganda, against our troops old habits die hard,
Art, the way I see things, Vindman, Strozk and their ilk weren’t high enough to be perceived and respected as policy/decision-makers by the rest of us. We perceived them only when others pulled them into the public spotlight. That is my definition of “low-level”. Low enough that their positions couldn’t honestly cash the checks their egos were writing.
About 2% of U.S. Army personnel outranked Alexander Vindman at the time of his retirement. Vindman fancied ‘the Interagency’ made policy and not the president, and took to scheming to undermine his boss. He merited harsher punishment than he received. He was mustered out, as are half those occupying the rank of Lt. Colonel. Peter Sztrok is a much more sinister character. A trial lawyer of my acquaintance watching his performance in front of Congress said in more than four decades of questioning witnesses in criminal and civil trials, he had never seen such snide and condescending behavior. He did injury to private citizens. He deserves criminal prosecution.
These men were not low level. Had they been, they would be less trouble. Miles Taylor was low level.
vindman was the cover up man for the steal, that involved privat bank, which lost billions of our tax dollars, who’s head also owned burisma, which employed hunter, burisma is deep in the clean energy scam,
as for strzok, besides his norman bates mien, is just a guy who takes credit for other’s work, puteyev ran the chapman ring, (he’s the jeremy irons character in red sparrow) and he was a walk in, yet they still almost let them get away, other soviet agents like dobbins had the run of the place, and apparently this new cell leader, they recently discovered, which were sleepers, but he went after carter page and general flynn, lying about whistleblower lokhova,
Carl Bernstein was a “red diaper baby.” Others who started at the bottom might be liberals and Democrats, but weren’t so dogmatically left wing. I suspect the big change came when younger reporters who would have hated Johnson and Humphrey in the old days realized that from the nineties or so on, all their enemies would be Republicans. The lack of ideological diversity in the parties encouraged partisanship among journalists.