|
There are several tags on Amazen associated with the book Dead Certain. One of them is "right leader for civilization today". I actually think that's accurate although it would be even more accurate to say that Chimpy is a "fitting leader for civilization today". We have allowed our society to devolve into a culture of wealth-worship where media competes for the lowest common denominator between rounds of cheerleading the establishment; schools are designed to turn out happy little worker bees rather than bright, inquiring citizens and the populace votes for the leader who reminds them most of themselves.
There is a saying in boxing and wrestling that every generation ends up with a champion who reflects the times. I think it's also true that the US ends up with a president who reflects the times. For most of the Eighties, you had Reagan: Charming, pleasent but also ruthlessly self-absorbed. Bush the Elder was a one-term president, little more than a linking chapter. Then, for most of the Nineties, you had Clinton: Also pleasent, also charming but image-obsessed and fatally flawed. The Nineties were the decade we got back in touch with our feelings, when emotion rather than reason became king. I'm not accusing Clinton himself of that but it's fair to say his public persona was based, at least in part, on "sharing your pain", on an emotional connection between the president and the electorate.
In Bush the Lesser, we get the end-result of that process: A government driven entirely by emotion, by who hates whom, by religion which is ultimately also emotion-driven (and I say that as a man of faith) and by the "I've got mine" impulse. "Reason" has almost become a despised concept to those in charge. Everyone's familiar with the concept and possibly the exchange that led to a certain contingent of the government being named the "reality-based faction" but one could just as easily say that the divide revealed was that of reason, the empirical study of reality and how we react to it versus an emotion-driven viewpoint. Don't misunderstand me, the question of "what is reality?" has a valid place in, say, a philosophy seminar and the question of how we make reality conform to our wishes has a certain place in politics but an entire faction of government (the controlling faction, it seems) based on the idea that reality can be manufactured, that's new and it is primarily an emotion-driven response.
The election process itself has become so obsessed with emotional reaction that reason has exited stage right. Politicians compete to heap vague pronouncements on the electorate, scrupulously avoiding specifics; honing their appeal not by attempting to reason with the voters but by trying to convince the voters to like them, to identify themselves with the candidate operating on the fairly safe assumption that the public will vote not for the candidate who has the best policies (if that were the case, we could just hand the nomination to Kucinich now) but on who the public likes most, who is most similar to them. Well, we've seen where that ends up. If the electorate doesn't read (the average American reads 99 hours a year, the average Brit reads slightly under four hundred hours a year and that's similar in most of the Western world), you end up with a president who famously doesn't read newspapers, magazines or books (or his PDBs, apparently). If you pick a candidate who looks like the electorate, you end up with someone entirely emotion driven, highly religious, not stupid as such but intellectually lazy and easily distracted. Much of conservative politics today is not about discussing or arguing that one's own approach would produce better results but of the electorate asking the politician to legitimise their own prejudices. You end up with a president who, when deciding whether to invade a sovering nation, prays for guidance. Now, as I said, I'm a man of faith and prayer is a perfectly reasonable supplement to a decision making process. It's not meant to be a substitute for such a process though. That's why "socialism" is used as a slam word, not because of flaws in the socialist system (socialism is a perfectly reasonable system, albeit one I consider unworkable) but because the electorate have been trained to react emotionally to the word.
You end up with schools designed not to turn out bright, inquiring young minds. Not to produce a mind which reasons it's way through life but to produce happy worker ants, enthuasiastic consumers (note: I am talking about the school system here, not the teachers who often make heroic efforts for the kids). Information imparted must be the right kind of information, it must confirm a pre-existing worldview (the superiority of western capitalism). What lesson is taught by having to get a permission slip to take a piss? Obediance to authority figures, the same lesson imparted by the endless bells. The school system as we practice it isn't designed to impart information but to teach obediance to authority, to teach that our way is the right way, the only way.
Media both reflects and reinforces that lesson (some more than others): That the authority figures is looking out for you, that they know better and in the scramble for the almighty ratings, media rushes to appeal to the intellectually lazy, to the Jackass crowd, to ask television to legitimise our prejudices by reflecting them. Why bother having an in-depth debate on the issues when you can have two pundits scream soundbites at each other (as Jon Stewert so gloriously pointed out by challenging the whole concept during his appearence with Tucker Carlson), why challenge your viewers when you can mollycoddle them? Again, the appeal to feel rather than think. Modern political coverage resembles something like a verbal gladatorial contest and likes the plebs of ancient Rome, the modern rubes eat it up, never being asked to think, simply to feel, to cheer for their favourite. That's why the discussions of John Edward's haircut or Hillary Clinton's cleavage receive so much more play than their positions on issues. When talking about a woman who may be president, I want to hear her views on the enviroment, her stance on abortion, her approach to ending the bloody war; I don't actually care much if she has breasts unless she starts appearing in Playboy but our media focuses on those traits because their viewers have an emotional reaction to Hillary's tits or Edward's hair or whether Senator Craig gets a blowjob (that, and they're cheap to cover).
So in that sense, Bush is the right leader for our civilisation, he reflects it most closely. He is, if you like, the emobodiment of our current society. You may feel that I am suggesting here that we discard emotion entirely, that we become Vulcans. I am not doing so. Rather, I am protesting the emphasis on emotion to the exclusion of reason. To paraphrase Joe Strazcinsky, emotion and reason are the shoes on your feet, you get further on both than you do on one. Nor am I suggesting that because our society is so, that it ever must be so. I am, amongst others things, a perfectabilist. That's a fancy way of saying I believe that mankind is perfectable, that through a long process of societal evolution, we can achieve the perfect society (which we are nowhere near currently). Part of that process involves encouraging certain traits and discouraging others, not by the crude method of force but by, for example, encouraging our schools to teach basic logic and debate skills over rote repetition and mindless "school spirit".
At the least, it would be nice to see a leader who encourages us to live up to our ideals rather than living down to our expectations.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
