Descending into Barbarism

We gon' fight
We gon' charge, we gon' stomp
We gon' march through the swamp
We gon' mosh through the marsh
Take us right through the doors
Come on...

They ain't gon' stop us -- they can't
We're stronger now, more than ever
They tell us "No", we say "Yeah"
They tell us "Stop", we say "Go"
Rebel with a rebel yell
Raise hell -- we gon' let em know
Stomp, push, shove, mush...
Fuck Bush
Until they bring our troops home, c'mon, just...

Moshpits outside the oval office
Someone's tryin to tell us something
Maybe this is God just sayin' we're responsible
For this monster -- this coward that we have empowered
This is Bin Laden
Look at his head noddin'
How could we allow something like this without pumpin' our fists
Now, this is our final hour
Let me be the voice, and your strength and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify it, times it, and multiply it by sixteen million
People are equal at this high pitch
Maybe we can reach al CIAda through my speech
Let the president answer our high anarchy
Strap him with a AK-47, let him go fight his own war
Let him impress daddy that way
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil
No more psychological warfare to trick us to thinking that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country, we're patronizing our hero
Look in his eyes, its all lies
The stars and stripes, have been swiped
Washed out and wiped and replaced with his own face
Mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight, you'll know why
'Cuz I told you to fight ...

And as we proceed to mosh through this desert storm... in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ... as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president for the present... and mosh for the future of our next generation... to speak and be heard... Mr President... Mr Senator...

(Kids: Hear us, hear us?... Hahaha)

[Excerpted from lyrics to the newly-released "Mosh" video by rap star Eminem. Video at http://mosh.eminem.com/video/.]

The video urges viewers, in closing, to vote on November 2.

Of course it'll be great if it helps "fuck Bush" and get him kicked out of the White House. But the question occurs: if this is the direction of our political discourse, what kind of future are we looking at?

"I think there's a campaign under way to totally politicize journalism and totally politicize press criticism," says Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at New York University. "It's really an attack not just on the liberal media or press bias, it's an attack on professionalism itself, on the idea that there could be disinterested reporters." (Quoted in "Web Offers Hefty Voice to Critics of Mainstream Journalists," New York Times, October 28, 2004.)

On Rosen's own blog, he wonders at his own incoherence while being interviewed recently by the BBC:

During the interview, I was tripping over my words, repeating myself, messing up and starting over, or just talking without making sense. There were no good answers. There were lots of confusing and hopelessly abstract answers. It was embarrassing because I'm supposed to be a professional; I've done several hundred interviews like this. So what happened, just a bad day?

I don't think so.

There's too much happening. The public world is changing faster than we can invent terms for describing it. Some of the things the BBC reporter and I were trying to discuss were [list of 20 items, including]:

• Trust in the mainstream media and what's happening to it
• The problem of propaganda and the intensity of its practice in 2004
• Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer, a disinterested account
• the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters

Every one of these things is related to all the others. But there is no over-arching narrative to contain them all. I spend much of the day trying to figure out what the connections are, and how best to phrase them. It's exciting; it's exhausting.

What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There's too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it's pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary.

Can anyone help? Do you even know what I'm talking about? Hit the comment button and tell us: what connects the items on my list?

This year has been a challenge for "objective" and "neutral" media-types because so much of the discourse is based on raw emotion, mostly hate, and it is hard to report on emotion. It seems people, with TOO much information at their fingertips, seem inclined to seek out knowledge to reinforce their emotion, hence the rise of the blog and the credibility of bloggers. It almost seems like the creature of Bush-bashing is feeding on itself....

Professor Rosen, I too feel like I'm a click away from drowing in the dirty waters of Election coverage.

Another visitor comments:

Not only has the MSM [mainstream media] been discredited, but it is now facing an enemy (and yes, the blogosphere IS an enemy of the MSM) that is able to "observe, orient, decide and act" far faster than itself. It is also able to self-correct swiftly and publicly, something apparently impossible for the MSM, whose mantra now seems to be "deny, admit nothing, counter-accuse". This enemy is growing in size, influence and power and is helped along every time the MSM attempts to fabricate or distort facts that can easily be checked by those with a subscription to Google.

Now that the crisis is in full swing, it is not surprising to see alternative venues such as Jon Stewart or the blogs taking more prominent positions in the political debate. After all, who is to say that the reporting in those venues is any less legitimate than that of the MSM? And with the recognition that there is no such thing as objective journalism anymore, it is no surprise that there is a "reality-gap" between the left and the right. In an era where each individual can easily immerse himself deeply in political discourse while never hearing a fair or honest discussion of competing views, it would be surprising if it were otherwise.

Thus, the importance of propaganda becomes greater as facts dissolve into disputed opinions. The rise of organizations such as moveon.org, (indeed any of the 527s) or Soros' intervention in American politics is a natural reaction to the collapse of MSM legitimacy. And the best propaganda is that which clearly focuses the hate of an individual upon the propagandist's political enemies. Hence we see the growing political invective, the use of social issues as political levers, the collapse of civility among the political leadership, and the nascent return of political violence (so far limited to voter harassment and campaign sign theft) to the American scene.

One can only wonder where things will go from here!

What about the commander in chief's opinions? Al Gore, in a recent speech, discussing what it is that "insulates [Bush] from any logical challenge or even debate," says it is important to understand that ideology is the source of Bush's inflexibility -- not religious faith:

Most of the problems he has caused for this country stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency....

His seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction -- when in fact it is this very inflexibility, based on a willful refusal to even consider alternative opinions or conflicting evidence, that poses the most serious danger to the country. And by the same token, the simplicity of his pronouncements, which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite -- they mark his refusal to even consider complexity. That is a particularly difficult problem in a world where the challenges we face are often quite complex and require rigorous analysis.

The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O'Neill, "this is our due."...

George Orwell said, "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

[Excerpted from Al Gore's speech at Georgetown University, October 18 , 2004.]

Delusion, it seems, is pervasive -- afflicting the president, the press, the people. (See also my Drowning in Deceit.) And it seems unshakeable, like the modern strains of tuberculosis against which known medicines have no effect.

My Answer

But it would involve facing the direct, basic problems of our discourse.

I have some personal experience in confronting ferocious, immovable wrongheadedness -- I have in mind certain extended email exchanges with a practicing journalist whom I know.

I'll be blunt: the basic problem is one of reasoning ability.

There is a reason for the whirlwind of garbage swirling throughout our information universe: garbage works. It sells. It influences.

Mankind needs reason.

Logic is the universal frame of reference. It's the absolute standard by which we can reconcile our differences.

To put it in the vernacular --

"It's the stupidity, stupid!"

The idea that entire forests of irrational discourse might be levelled using classical tools of objective (non-partisan!) reasoning has not really occurred to us.

Recognizing our problem would be Step 1.

I don't know. But one of my few recent contacts with a journalism school gives little ground for optimism.

On Oct. 20, Toronto's Ryerson University School of Journalism sponsored (together with the New York Review of Books) a panel discussion on one of the most outstanding press failures of recent times, entitled "How the American Press Failed in Iraq: War, Torture and Accountability."

One of the panelists was Michael Massing, author of "Now they tell us," an article assailing the performance of the press prior to the invasion of Iraq.

I was intrigued to learn of the event because coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time, I'd written Pre-War News Coverage: Defective Criticism, an examination of Massing's piece that demonstrates, through a series of specific examples, that his arguments are seriously illogical.

I only learned of the Ryerson event shortly after it had already taken place, but I sent the School a polite note to let them know of my article and inquire whether anyone would care to discuss it. I emailed four people on the faculty list who seemed involved with print journalism -- John Miller, Ann Rauhala, Don Gibb, and Suanne Kelman, who is the School's Interim Chair and had been the panel moderator. After not hearing back from any of them, I phoned Ms. Kelman.

She knew who I was and was instantly hostile. Only ten students had shown up for the event, she told me impatiently, adding that if the School accepted all offers from would-be visitors (like me) there would be no time for classes.

Was there no interest in discussing the problems with the press criticism their visiting panelist had authored?

Perhaps, she said -- but they would not be interested in discussing them with me. And with no further ado, the lady hung up the phone.

A recent commentary in BusinessWeek magazine observes:

In recent years, American political discourse crossed a line, and all sorts of once-taboo language and personal invective became acceptable.... [The] nastiness isn't confined to public figures. It now pervades our private discourse as well. I speak from experience. Over the last couple of years, angry readers have sent me e-mails calling me a liar, a racist, a s---head, a traitor, a moron, an idiot, and insipid, among other unseemly things, because of what I've written in my columns.

A few weeks ago, some fellow wrote saying he hoped my parents would die. When I get e-mails like that, I find myself yearning for some way to demand immediate and public redress.

I checked with several people who routinely make their views public, including Daniel Okrent, the reader's representative at The New York Times; David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who has been critical of the Patriot Act; Omar Ahmed, chairman of a national group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations; and Jim Wallis, an evangelical pastor who is editor of Sojourner Magazine and a leader of Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups formed to fight poverty.

All of them said they've observed a similar slide into invective in the last year or two. "It was ugly before, and it's getting uglier," sums up Okrent....

I think the real problem is that people see and hear so much incivility from public figures, courtesy of the TV, the Internet, and talk radio, that it seems acceptable. Nastiness is now the norm. And this has to be stopped before it gets any worse.

[Excerpted from "America's Uncivil Liberties," BusinessWeek, October 22, 2004, by Thane Peterson.]

If Ms. Kelman transmits such a mindset to her students, it probably would benefit the progression of their individual careers in the increasingly corporate journalism world. But its only effect on the news would be to pervert it.