Ears

First, before I lay into my actual topic, I encourage everyone to take a long look at the blog maintained by my good friend Kyle. He has assembled a savant-status review of the music released in 2008, which can be found here, and his proper blog homepage can be found just to the left: it is appropriately titled "Kyle's Grand Scale of Debauchery". Many congratulations to him for such a stellar and comprehensive narrative, and an encyclopedic knowledge about this medium.

------

It has struck me--and here I mean that, although it has always been a sensation that has antagonized me, I have recently began to experience and internalize a sort of visceral disgust--that there are a very few people who are in the public view who are interested in acting in accordance with the advancement of the quality of humankind. It makes me double-over, the intense frivolity that arches over even very serious issues, such as the ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip. I have only just graduated with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and in accordance with that meager status, I am not able to affect a great deal of action: as an individual and single author, I simply have no civic power. A reader might now think it prudent to start a response to this entry, leading in with the feeble comfort, yes, you do have power, for everyone who has a voice has power. But I am embarrassed and something close to heartbroken when I watch television news, or more broadly, any format which allows for people to give their opinion on world affairs or current events and conditions. The amount of triviality, or poor research, or feeble logic, or adulterous ideological barking that fills a segment is inarguably devastating to the public good.

One of the more startling things about these kinds of programs is the prediliction of both the guests and the hosts to know nothing and think badly, but speak loudly. I am not sure how it is that we can allow for the course of discourse to be inexorably linked to the whim of whomsoever controls the largest media conglomerate. It is not the hegemonic power that concerns me, it is the seeming destiny of those powers to pervert truths in order to advance certain viewpoints which is most disturbing, or more exactly, the drive to stimulate in the viewing audience a specific, boisterous reaction; the shows are inflammatory to an audience that cannot decide for itself, and grotesque to an audience that can: they are vacuous. With the broad scale of power that primetime news and talk shows seem to have over the majority opinion, or at least the potential sway that they are permitted, it seems that a shared goal of these organizations should rightly be to infuse some sort of message aimed at correction of a problem.

Ought not we each to seek solutions, instead of create noise for its own sake? One's own opinion--or worse, serving as a proxy for another's opinion--serves no intrinsic purpose, and satisfies no glaring need: it occupies space in our social narrative, but provides nothing in the way of quality. It is clutter. When one does not position himself rightly, and instead he filabusters and exclaims and postures, he objectively discredits his own cause; subjectively, though, he often becomes more appealing because of the lazy intellect and poor decision-making of the American dullard. In other words, two things may happen that make the fool appear amicable, and worse, intelligent: his audience may identify with or be tricked by his raucous language, and thus be set at ease that he has their interests in mind; or, he may, in all of his yattering, shut out the voice of the reasoned speaker, or otherwise turn off the appetite of the audience towards rationality, patience, and keenness. Anti-intellectualism in America is pervasive, and it is self-fecundate--for when all that is offered in the way of information is blind lauding of an ideology as a construct, and not analysis for its specific products, the world and the complex issues it contains become polarized.  Thus conceived, all one must do is pick either side, and then curse the other for its vices, never minding a careful reflection about his confederates or about problems that still exist in the world; when a person belongs to a side, that identity is enough to encourage the fool to feel secure that he is making a difference. There it is, then, the great ideological problem of the 21st century: the idiot is made the prince, and his enemy the scholar is become the bore.