Truthiness

I decided a few weeks ago to write a piece on immigration, as a way of educating myself. I hadn't much been paying attention to the issue until a few days earlier, and when a friend asked me my position on the Immigration Bill, I realized I didn't have one. It seemed like I should, but all I had was an opinion (which is that this is going to be Desegregation all over again).

I didn't have a position, just an opinion. Now here's a distinction almost nobody could have grasped a year ago. Thank God for Steven Colbert!

I read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1994. The book really struck a nerve with its argument that the replacement of newspapers by television news had dumbed down political debate in this country. I'd been traumatized by the spread of the Dittoheads for a few years, ever since the rabbi of the Orthodox synagogue I used to attend started quoting Rush Limbaugh from the pulpit.

About the same time, I had my first exposure to Libertarianism, on the politics forum of a local BBS (back in the day). Suddenly one day all my nerdy friends became Libertarians, seemingly overnight. I came to discover that these otherwise intelligent people had become the quasi-Dittoheads of Neil Boortz. They had switched off their critical thinking on social and political issues, in favor of a handful of patriotic aphorisms and vague references to complex economic principles, delivered by an engaging and confrontational talk-show personality. None of them could tell me what the party's current policy platform was; just that they were going to transform America into free-market utopia of locally governed communities where private individuals live in tax-free bliss.

At the time, I was just shocked and disappointed at the stupidity of my smart friends. I understood that heated exchanges and diatribes would always be more popular than the boring political talk shows of the day. But I assumed intelligent people would continue to understand and uphold the values of informed citizenship. I was burdened with the sadly elitist notion that marketing didn't work on the critical thinking of intellectuals I didn't think smart people fell for demagogues.

It never occurred to me then, that I was seeing a defining moment in the greatest battle of Pat Buchanan's Culture War, the battle for control of the Fourth Estate. But over the course of following decade, I saw the entire tradition of civic virtue and activist citizenship crumble as American Journalism became first the victim, then the mouthpiece, of an antidemocratic Corporatist power elite. Recently, having seen Frontline's penetrating analysis of Carl Rove's career and strategic vision, I've come to accept that the whole thing was carefully orchestrated by the enemies of the Illuminati.

Nobody ever talks about policy issues anymore. Most people don't even know what the important issues of the day are. They speak instead of vague concepts, like "the economy," "security," and "privacy." Politics revolves around "anger-issues" that bring voters to the polls and get high ratings on talk shows.

This transformation of informed citizens into consumers of truthiness was the crowning achievement in the subversion of Democracy. Nobody sounded the alarm, because the first thing the mob did was buy off the cops. So now a bloodless coup has replaced American national sovereignty with a transnational oligarchic theocracy, and political liberty with product selection.

It makes me want to shop.