An echo.
“When we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” Llike an echo of my own refrain as a new blogger at Culture Kitchen five years ago, urging (in a quite civil indoor voice!) some well-modulated post-partisan Sam Waterston Unity ’08 thinking and talking: Amplifying Our Differences
Amplified sound, in effect, may diminish rather than amplify our individualism, our audience, even our own ability to pay attention or care about all we’ve lost. . .
Should we care, if the heavy bass and deafening levels of powerful modern difference-amplifiers blow out everybody’s eardrums along with our will to live, and thus our chances for ever building any majority audience able to appreciate artistic, nuanced and truly innovative political theatre?
. . .Does it matter if we the people learn to prefer politics to problem-solving, screaming to singing, mass media to personal passion?
I wish the ralliers more luck with being heard now than I had then. America’s appetite and audience seem bigger now for subtle, intelligently designed sounds of sanity, so that’s something.
Maybe as usual I just peaked too soon? I’ve been straining to hear and understand for many years while guns were blazing and sirens shrieking, tuning in earnestly to years of FOX and right-rant radio, trying to figure it out.
It’s insidious. Amplification deafens you to the wrong thing! — by trying so hard to be intellectually curious, fair-minded, engaged and reasoning, I’ve been systematically deafened BY the loudest and craziest, FOR the loudest and craziest, TO all but the loudest and craziest! It feels like a lifetime ago that I could comfortably hear (or speak) real hope about America’s chances of restoring sanity.
So could my personal power of story be that I’ve paid a hubris price for going it alone without publisher or party, hoping I could individually trade off small damage to myself in return for contributing to the common good but failing miserably, like Dr. Jekyll experimenting on himself for good cause but becoming Mr. Hyde?
Halloween two days before a momentous election, is a better time than most, I guess, for ghostly fears to echo. I won’t scream it, but please. Vote.
Diane (DK) Roberts is a homegrown treasure, author of the true and truly funny political and cultural history, Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife.
I just found out she’s written a breezy yet incisive voter’s guide for our capital city/county’s insane choices this cycle. Here’s how she sizes up the statewide race for attorney general, for example:
Note about that horrendous anti-public interest endorsement btw, which I only just learned about from DK’s guide. I quit subscribing to our capital city newspaper of record (the Tallahassee Democrat) which recently went behind a paywall. On principle I’ve been protesting their gating off of local public citizenship news and community conversation, as a cynical abdication of the role real journalism is responsible for in our free-press system. Editorial boards were a significant part of that, before newspapers became just another Big Business extracting maximum money from the people, for minimum value in return.
So what used to be a real newspaper is seriously endorsing FOX talking pageant-hair heads now. I guess the folks inside their paywall no longer see any need to even pretend?
More about blonde Pam Bondi, who seems to have won as my new attorney general:
Pam Bondi Stole My Dog and Bitterness Over Dog Lingers
There’s art, guys!
Well, it’s two AM and I’m going to bed. The question is, what will there be to get up for tomorrow morning?
Depressing all around.
Advice for progressives
Advice for “Centrist” Democrats
Advice about what’s sane and insane:
This sure isn’t sanity but it seems to be actual news (in column form?)
This OTOH does sound like sanity to what’s left of my hearing:
[Groaning at "the most conservative Legislature in Florida history."] I see lots of 2011 church-state blog posts tagged “Florida” in my future.
And more warmongering from America’s “news analysts”, does that sound sane in any possible sense?
Lynn, I almost wish that would be the real problem but it’s just bread and circus to get the old folks out to supposedly “vote their interest.”
The real power of story in unchecked GOP power has been massive, callous cash corruption, has been for decades and this should finish us off. They will proceed with the “privatizing” (which means exploiting for profit and would more accurately be referred to as strip-mining) — schools and prisons and of course medical care if you can get it, in addition to literal environmental pillage like offshore oil drilling.
Their entrenched sense of entitlement to take everything the people have all for themselves and call it the American Way, is ironic or at least oxymoronic, considering how viciously their words oppose “entitlement.”
Hey, shall we collaborate to flesh out the theme of Church as bread and circuses?
White southern Democrats Nearly Extinct, “Culturally Unacceptable”:
And more marching backward:
Hey, shall we collaborate to flesh out the theme of Church as bread and circuses?
Actually, I was hoping you could give me directions to bread and circuses. I need them this week or this month or the rest of my life.
Maybe I’m a lousy feminist but I don’t see the defeat of Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Palin-style mama grizzlies as “marching backward,” but forward. Whitman and Fiorina are inept, corrupt, heartless business women. Good riddance. Although some backward-marching women (like Jan Brewer) survived, others like Angle and McDonnell were soundly rejected: a single ray of sunlight peaking through the thick, dark gloom. Please, you can’t take that away from me, JJ.
It’s all I have left!
Um, that should be peeking.
Let’s hope that wasn’t the “peak” of our sunlight!
lol – I was thinking about doing that, too.
By the way and while I’m thinking about it, the ewes at Susan B. Anthony List are crediting their “Abortion is NOT Health Care” tour for election results:
Votes Have Consequences:
Lynn: I don’t see the defeat of Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina and Palin-style mama grizzlies as “marching backward,” but forward.
Heck, neither do I (or should I say me too!)
I mourn the loss of the first woman Speaker who was character-assassinated by those other women, to the extent that it’s even about sex which it shouldn’t be except now it will be again, sigh.
Remember that I come from public policy and service myself. I had a great ride and thought it was progress but that was decades ago. I was kidding myself, I guess. I meant what has happened to everything from the economy and our standing in the world, to the intelligence of our public and our passions, to our politics and policy, to our formerly larger-than-life giants on the Supreme Court and yes, to the rightful progress of women as the true majority of the American citizenry.
But mostly what I meant by marching backward was the fact of these women as major party candidates in the first place, with so much corporate cash pushing them on us, and the retrograde effect of their shameful and therefore shameless campaigns — not that they lost, for which I am grateful. And I’m glad they lost not because they were women but because they were backward, self-involved and unworthy as real public servants.
I meant what has happened by cynical if not anti-American design, ever since I came of age in the Nixon era (I started to say “I came of age under Nixon”, shudder!)
Forgot to include this one:
Susan B. Anthony List Challenges Ban on False Abortion Claims
JJ: Heck, neither do I!
Oh, I know. Lately, I’ve been hearing (from the right and left) a lot of the timeless “If only women ran the world… ” idea, which I’ve always rejected – now more than ever.
Regarding character assasination and sex appeal, if I had to make sense of our (California) female candidates based only on the stuff I hear from conservatives that I know, I’d explain it this way:
“Nancy Pelosi has had too much Botox and Barbara Boxer (like Hillary) hasn’t had enough. The only reason they keep getting elected is that liberals are stupid and superficial.”
Yep. That’s my world. Please pray for me.
[...] Left of What’s Right on Left or Right? 7 11 2010 Maher went on to poke holes in Jon’s arguments, saying “Martin Luther King spoke on that Mall in the capital and he didn’t say, [...]
The very definition of insanity just broke in Colorado news:
Is Jon Stewart any saner than the rest of our public figures and news entertainers, then?
Seems like now he too is using the cable media business and his own celebrity to distort American political reality into just another funhouse mirror —