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A Republican candidate to represent Georgia in the United States Senate, Herschel Walker, had this analysis of global climate change this week:
“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then — now we got to clean that back up.”
Please note that this was not a casual remark caught on a hot mike, but part of a prepared campaign speech.
A few years ago, if you had presented this as a satire of political speech you would have been accused of going over the top. Today, it’s not even an outlier. We are awash in a sea of inanity, bombarded daily with statements that are stunningly ignorant, stupid, incoherent, malevolent and toxic. A sickening number of politicians make such statements every day, and an army of knuckle-draggers amplifies and spreads the garbage around the world.
How did we get here? I’m glad you asked.
Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, just inside the entrance to any means of publication — from newsletters to newspapers to magazines to local and network television shows — there was an editor. Anyone who submitted an article or item or idea submitted it to an editor. If it was a crackpot conspiracy theory, the editor spiked it; if the grammar and punctuation made it read like it was translated from a primitive language by an inadequate computer, spiked; if it was not properly sourced, ditto; if it was a bitter personal attack, goodbye (broadcasters were once requited by the FCC to offer equal time to anyone who had been attacked on their air); if the diction was perfect, the grammar excellent and the spelling flawless, but its ideas and conclusions were deranged, spiked.
In such a system, in which I worked for most of my career as a writer, editor and broadcaster, a radio program such as Rush Limbaugh’s or a cable network such as Fox News, would have been impossible. Unthinkable, actually. [EDITOR: That’s a sentence fragment, not allowed. WRITER: Bugger off this is the Internet.]
Then came Facebook, and all the other Internet platforms known as “social media.” Suddenly, the entire lunatic fringe of the country, which has always been about 20% of the population, but which had until then been resolutely rejected by editors, had untrammeled access to a global audience for whatever drivel they could conjure up. [EDITOR: That should be “up with which they could conjure.” WRITER: Bugger off.]
Suddenly, thousands and thousands of people who did not know the difference between an apostrophe and a catastrophe had in their spare bedrooms everything necessary to produce radio broadcasts, videos and essays and make them available to the world. The fact that they did not know how to do any of those things did not deter anyone, nor did the fact that they had nothing to say that made any sense. And the deluge came.
What can we do now? Probably nothing. Any suggestion of limiting in any way this steady flow of garbage is met with loud cries of the authors’ God-given, Constitutional right to impose their idiocy on the world. They have always had freedom of speech under our Constitution; now they expect freedom to be heard. That’s different.
It’s not just the misinformation. If the lifeline that connects us as human beings and allows us to at least begin to understand each other — I’m talking about language — is corrupted, and rots, and becomes as incomprehensible as Herschel Walker, then we are all lost.
We have 5 yrs left of any kind of economic continuity and only 10 yrs biosphere is offed. I live in a cave now.
“Any suggestion of limiting in any way this steady flow of garbage is met with loud cries of the authors’ God-given, Constitutional right to impose their idiocy on the world.”
Like the belief in the idea that MMT was one of the primary drivers of government debt, even though should there ever be an MMT regime, a thing we have not yet seen, or likely ever see, a government would spend money into existence interest free, and therefore, there could be no government debt, by definition?
Hey, we all make blunders kid, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are trying to “impose our idiocy on the world.”
Usually, these type of rookie missteps are a result of not doing our homework, preferring instead to … what? Mindlessly regurgitate someone else’s nonsense, that we foolishly trust?
Like the movers and shakers within the Fed/Wall Street complex, perhaps, and the tens of thousands of neo-liberal economists who serve them?
And jeepers creeper Tom, what is it with all the puching down? I will remind you once again, that ALL main stream media narratives regarding Covid have been DEBUNKED, thanks mostly to the hoi polloi, and as far as this Ukraine business goes, the daily misinformation emanating from MSM sources these days, and there is still tons of tons of it, has a half-life of less than 24 hours.
Again, thanks mostly to low rent riff raff counter-sources, like the Saker, Moon of Alabama, the Duran, Jimmy Dore, Jackson Hinkle, Redacted, Caitlin Johnstone, Brian Berletic at the New Atlas, and a few others (very few), who are all under constant threat of having their social media presence erased with no explanation or warning.
Happened to Hinkle, actually, just last week.
A fine JOURNALIST is (was?) Hinkle, and I will miss him if it proves he is permanently gone.
A good kid. Only 21 years old. Just wanted to seek the truth and report it to the American people. Been at it for just a little over a year. So sad. Struck down in his youth for trying to serve.
Do you still read the New York Times Tom? Just wondering. I do. I buy it and I try to apply the cheater code I used to use when I was reading Pravda and Izvestia during the Soviet times, the one that allowed you to get very close to the truth, but it doesn’t work.
Pravda and Izvestia were lying and obuscating, in an effort to twist reality. But the NYT, it’s just 100% devoted to the make-believe, and nothing else. No cheater code in pursuit of the truth can help you in that environment.
So I approach it now like it is a comic book, which means I mostly look at the pictures (their photography is still quite good!), and I leaf through the paper, over coffee, just like old days, and if you espied me from afar you would think old Max424 is doing what he has always done.
Reading the NYT and gathering information. But that would be an illusion.
Note: Oh, btw, looks like my predictions on Day 4 (?) are all coming to pass? The Russians are going to fight a high tech modern war against the combined forces of a near peer, (Ukies on the ground), and a peer (Nato in the sky), and fight it like gentleman, they are going dominate every aspect of it, and when it is done military experts the world over will study this operation from now until the end of time.
For the utter brilliance and audacity of it, to be sure, but mostly, for the discipline and composure this army has shown in the field.
To fight a war to the death with one armed tied behind your back, so as to always be on the righteous side of things? It’s been a stunning thing to watch unfold.
Mr. Blue Pencil here: Herschel Walker is running to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.
Excellent column, sir. Yes, social media lower the bar on the quality of public discourse. It’s bad enough that public discourse is becoming ever more an empty exercise. But it’s likely that we have not yet hit bottom, as long as we do nothing to change the relationship between ourselves and social media. For if we do nothing, social media will find new ways to short-circuit a viewer’s critical faculties to keep the eyeballs riveted to the screen. This amped-up level of spectacle and stimuli will, over time, erode a person’s ability to form coherent thoughts, and fragment what’s left of social cohesion even further. Frank Zappa had a little fun describing the nefarious effects of television in the song “I’m the Slime,” from the album Overnight Sensation. But I’m certain that if he were alive today, he would find the situation you described so well to be no laughing matter.
Oops. Fixed.
Walker is running in Georgia, not Pennsylvania
Renowned linguist, Derek Bickerton, proposed that language was the evolutionary driver of higher intelligence rather than vice versa; that the more nuanced and complex one’s language, the better his chances to think through life’s more challenging problems, and, in turn, communicate those thoughts to his fellows. The gabbier tribes prevailed!
Complex language marked the real advent of humanity. Hell, dogs and cats are clever, racoons have prehensile hands, and even the humble kangaroo stands erect. But it is language that has made mankind the most socially interactive of all species and thus able to seize dominion over all the earth.
That venerable Greek tragedy/pathos known as ‘The Gospel of John’ seemed to confirm (well in advance) Bickerton’s theory in the very first sentence: “In the beginning was the Word.”… Great stuff! Those ancient Greeks – gotta love ’em!
The erosion of the historical bar to publication (high cost requiring submission to editorial review) is a byproduct of the democratization of production that has lowered the cost of production precipitously. Accordingly, nitwits with nothing to say (a parallel erosion of educational standards ballooned their numbers) find themselves platformed at essentially no cost beyond the time spent spewing. Not only true of journalism and literature but the arts as well. To wit: every Guitar Hero joker or weekend DJ who thinks him- or herself an actual musician worthy of entertaining the masses. But on balance, a few excellent creative voices manage to cut through all the noise and clutter to establish themselves as worthy of attention. The balance is by no means 50/50 or even close. Sturgeon’s Law was in effect even before social media. Think of it instead, by way of example, as an exponential rise in options from zero TV networks (before the mid-20th century) to three primary networks (from the 50s to the onset of the cable era) to a glut of options that now requires significant time navigating and sorting to find something worth watching (not to mention the gigantic back catalog).
Never heard of Sturgeon’s Law; just looked it up – makes sense. Thanks Brutus!
That is why you can’t have too much freedom in a society; you always need certain rules everyone can agree on. This applies not only to the communication of ideas and the use of language, but to the basic narrative a society endorses (though the two, language and narrative, are certainly closely related). Take that narrative away and chaos will ensue, and the tragic aftermath could be the substitution of that narrative by some other skewed narrative expediently promulgated by opportunists with nefarious intentions, much to the grief of the said society. One example is China. For centuries the Confucian narrative served China well, but the upheavals of the 19th and early 20th centuries — brought about by who or what, I believe I won’t need to say — caused the Chinese to doubt their traditions to the point that political opportunists such as the CCP could seize the chance to implement their (godforsaken) ideology and impose its iron yoke on the Chinese people down to the present day.
Confucius actually foresaw how the deformation of language can lead to the unraveling of the fabric of society. “If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth, as a consequence of which things cannot be accomplished, and as a consequence of which in turn ceremonies and music will not flourish; if they do not flourish, then punishments will not be just, and then the people will not know how to move hand or foot.” (Confucius, Analects 13:3)
Thought I’d drop by just to say hello after my long absence, by the way. Hope all’s been well — the (increasingly) lamentable state of our world notwithstanding.
Welcome back. I missed your learned voice.