Saturday Iced Mocha #21— Rant
**Disclaimer** — bottled up rant forthcoming.
The summer brings a different schedule and it was hard for me to get uninterrupted time to write. In particular, I didn’t have my daughter’s 150 minute theater class next to the coffee shop to provide the structured time. Fortunately for you, I sincerely missed the discipline of trying to control the noise in my brain into strings of coherent thoughts into sentences. I’m ready to pick it back up. As always, simply let me know if you want to opt out of receiving these musings.
I have a few partially written Saturday Iced Mochas, but with the current increased intensity of the news cycle, I feel compelled to write about it and will come back to some of the other topics. Before the summer started, I think I would have said it is highly unlikely that the news cycle could intensify. One thing I’m certain of, regardless of politics, is the media companies’ pocketbooks are all better off for the current state of affairs. As if Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, needed to make more money, the timing of his acquisition and investment into Washington Post was prescient. This profit motive is not one we should forget when trying to ascertain what “fake news’ really is. It’s particularly easy to forget this motive and assume journalistic integrity, particularly when the storyline is in line with your own sensibilities, in other words, being guilty of confirmation bias.
There’s a rule I’m trying to enact when I read political-oriented articles and it’s fairly simplistic. If the author attempts to simplify the political parties’ agendas by referring to something as the left or the right in a very holistic sense, I move on to another article. This labeling has become increasingly problematic. I’m also incredibly fatigued of reading articles that point out these vast agendas, often conspiracy theories, on the part of the left or the right (following my rule, you should now be moving on to another article), as if having different opinions on things or simply desiring power isn’t enough. While what we read and see is proven to be highly influential (the advertising industry exists for a reason), I honestly don’t believe most authors are writing stories to manipulate the readers for an agenda, but rather reporting on a specific topic with it almost impossible for their opinions to avoid also being present.
For those that watch or listen to Rush Limbaugh or Infowars, you shouldn’t be surprised that there are others that are entertained by the Daily Show or Colbert, and everyone should understand that these are highly profitable entertainment vehicles intending to engage a specific audience and keep them engaged to sell advertising. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy them, but I do think you should do your best to remember this profit motive. While the entertainers themselves likely have opinions broadly consistent with their entertainment, I wouldn’t put it past them to be more like Skip Bayless talking about sports, with a much greater emphasis on the entertainment. Packers fans likely most understand the Skip Bayless reference, as he’s one of the staunchest critics of Aaron Rodgers, usually weaving some illogical reason as to why he’s good, but not great (yes, I can bring almost anything back to a sports analogy).
That being said, I’m not so naive as to think the media isn’t heavily compromised by even more than a profit motive in many instances. When it comes to obtaining and retaining power, the political operatives have grown only more sophisticated with the game of manipulation and the use of media has put more at the fingertips. George Soros and Charles Koch clearly use sophisticated strategies to push their ideologies. While many would put them on opposite ends of the spectrum, it’s ironic to me how much both emphasize maximizing freedoms, again tying back to perhaps having more similar values than most would expect, despite vastly different opinions on how to move society toward those values.
Turning directly to Charlottesville, to reiterate many others, I feel strongly that it is wrong to put a similar moral equivalency on the two sides of demonstrators and doing so is similar to viewing a speeding ticket as equivalent to drunk driving. Just because someone is driving drunk doesn’t make it okay to speed, and both can definitely be highlighted as breaking the law, yet one has significantly greater penalties attached and we don’t tend to view them as morally equivalent. That being said, I’m not outraged that our President had little to offer to help the nation heal, as he has yet to show any semblance of a moral fabric. I think we are likely to learn a lot more about just how dark, or perhaps a better word is empty, our President actually is over the coming years, maybe sooner. Unfortunately, I suspect many will think it’s simply the fake news despite no supporting realistic counterpoints in his history to demonstrate otherwise.
Personally, Charlottesville makes me question what I could possibly do to help heal these deep wounds in our country that only appear to be widening, while not sacrificing too much of the ease of my personal, very fortunate, socio-economic and seemingly stable existence. Sharing a life with my wife and raising our two kids dominates our minute-to-minute priorities, with limited initiative to get outside our bubble, yet it’s difficult not to see much of what we have long taken for granted beginning to erode. I don’t intend that statement to come from a place of entitlement, but rather reflecting on a simple reality. I have been able to take for granted what many others have to struggle for and while the tools to improve people’s lives are progressing, our (humanities’) rigid ideologies and seemingly innate hunger for myth and scapegoats are becoming alarming barriers.
Turning to the underlying issues, I plan to do some future writing on how I think we need new myths to help humans better organize and better live in peace. Our tendency to rigidly interpret religious texts, economic theories and government structures leaves us prone to continued episodes of history repeating itself through warfare and human misery. That mixed with increasing technological prowess and access, in both good hands and bad hands (though it’s rarely so cleanly defined), does not bode well for our longer-term ability to thrive. It’s the stress of survival that hopefully helps us find better paths.
I will end this SIM with a request. Are there any particular publications or writers that the SIM community can point me toward that provide balanced coverage of events? As you can tell by my Charlottesville comment, I don’t think of balanced as needing to treat all sides of an issue or argument as equivalent, but I do think of balance as taking full consideration of others’ viewpoints and a willingness to evaluate why opinions differ so much, with a likely need to often point out the ever-present hypocrisy of all sides and an emphasis on often being nonpartisan (not bipartisan).
One last Trump rant, as while I think there should be a benefit to the fact that he really doesn’t belong to a specific political party or ideology, as far as I can tell, he has no redeeming qualities and limited skills. Unfortunately I think his greatest skill is being a brash caricature many Americans first seemed to be entertained by, and then grew to be impressed by, and that was enough when competing with the fracturing, out-of-touch political parties of today. For those that think I’m biased in my opinion of Trump, please point me to something he has written or accomplished that demonstrates competence and/or authentic leadership (sadly I don’t think becoming President counts and neither does The Apprentice). As I’ve written previously, I’m all for draining the swamp and I’d sincerely like my assessment to be wrong and hopefully I possess the intellectual honesty (see SIM #10 — Intellectual Honesty) to be open to new information.
I want plain-speaking leadership and candid opinions about the complexity of things. We need leadership that motivates a large swath of folks to want to be better people for the good of themselves as well as the community and country. We need to identify the common enemy as one of complacency and lack of purpose. And I think we need to organize around stronger local leadership. Our constitution was built with strong checks and balances and hopefully it will do the trick to re-orient our country to being a beacon of freedom and leadership by example. And if not, we shouldn’t treat the constitution as unassailable. Our tools are modernizing, the world’s population is absolutely massive, shouldn’t we be evaluating and developing better ways to organize and lead, leaning on the many lessons of history and science.
