Some Blasts From The Past

Now that I've simmered down from the anger and flight reaction of the election and submerged into a welcome numbness, I've taken some time to consider if I've been here before.  And with the benefit of having done a blog in the beginning years of the 21st century, I went back to some of them and discovered that, yes, I've been here before, albeit with less fear, less anger and no numbness.

So I've decided to resurrect three of those posts to share with you to see if you might feel the same way.  They all come from 2004, a year, in hindsight, which just might have been a kind of watershed leading to our current situation.  You can decide for yourself.

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Blast #1: "We Have Exactly What We're Told We Want."      (October 19, 2004)

Lots of my friends and family are gnawing at their knuckles in fear that John Kerry and the Democratic Party don't have the stuff to stop the fundamentalist terror machine of The Bushies.  Yep. And that bothers me, too.  But something else bothers me more.  When you step back from all the lies of the campaign trail, when you listen to what people are parroting from the media mouthpieces, you begin to understand that we, the US, think it's all just a big mosh pit anyway, so let's just keep moshing.  Based on the evidence in recent polls, the truth is we don't want a president, we don't want a leader...we want a body we can point to and complain about.

Of the two candidates, half the US wants a cheerleader who they think will leave them alone in their loneliness, and the other half don't know what they want (or can't articulate it) but are willing to accept whoever isn't the other guy.  We're all mostly lazy, busy making money, or struggling to breathe, and we don't or won't do the work to get some decent, truthful information.  So we rely on various media to spew their thoughts or news.  When that happens (as it has elsewhere in the past) we get exactly what we're told we want.  When I thought about this, an old phrase crept into my muddled mind...the fourth estate.  When I looked it up, I discovered an important discourse.

According to "The Mass Media as Fourth Estate," Thomas Carlyle (19th century historian) once quoted Edmund Burke (18th century philosopher/statesman) who coined the phrase, saying there are three cultural estates, but "in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all.  It is not a figure of speech...Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.  It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite."  Sounds pretty good.  And how does the modern fourth estate measure up?  The article continues, "We need to bear in mind that the prime function of most media organs today is to provoke the public with entertainment.  That naturally tends to negate any supposed fourth estate function, since there is not even much coverage of state practices in the first place, let alone any rational debate and criticism of them...it is always pertinent to ask whose fourth estate is this and in whose interest does it operate?"

Think about it.  We are mostly childish people, arrogant of our ignorance, seeking entertainment, not information.  Who needs information as long as we have our stuff?  Most of our "fourth estate" is a gaggle of shills, promoting themselves, their media corporations and their advertisers.  Oh, yes, some newspapers take risks (see "Catastrophic Success" in the NY Times), but how many of US read them?  News magazines run whatever pop pap ran longest the previous week.  Cable news is pure entertainment:  "Hardball" isn't hard, "Crossfire" is a minstrel show, "The MacLaughlin Group" is who's your daddy, "Hannity and Colmes" is guff and gutless, and "Reliable Sources" are not, to name a few.

So we get what we're told we want: a non-president and legislators who stuff pork into each bill they pass to satisfy our gluttony for stuff.  Or we can listen to Green Day's latest warning: "Don't wanna be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information age of hysteria/It's calling out to idiot America."

And that was 12 years ago, and the only change is that the media manipulators have honed their skills to a very fine edge that slices so fine we don't even feels it until it's too late.