Extraordinary Popular Idiocies

 

No matter how incompetently the current president handles crises, from the toll taken on the nation’s health and economy by the coronavirus to the nationwide protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd, his supporters, followers, and enablers continue giving him a free pass. No evidence makes an impression on them.

 

The coronavirus is a plot by Democrats to make the current president look bad! No, he makes himself look bad, in the same way that those pants don’t make you look fat – your fat makes you look fat. And the George Floyd protesters need to be dominated in the streets, because that’s what a strong leader does! Never mind that it is the behavior of a tinpot dictator, not the leader of a nation of laws guaranteeing the freedoms of speech and peaceable assembly.

Orlando-Ferguson-flat-earth-map edit
A Flat Earth map drawn in 1893 by Professor Orlando Ferguson of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Looks rather like a roulette wheel. From the collection of the Library of Congress.

There’s the word “peaceable” that reactionaries have hung their hats on for centuries as an excuse to violently quell protests. If only some of the protesters can be goaded into violence by agents provocateurs planted among them by law enforcement agencies or private reactionary groups, then the police employees in riot armor can have license to start swinging their clubs and firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into the crowds. In the ensuing confusion, it’s difficult for reporters or other independent investigators to locate and prove the identity of the provocateurs.

 

Boy making a rainbow with a garden hose
Boy making a rainbow with spray from a garden hose in Charleston, South Australia in January 2019. Photo by Photwik.

Too many people believe, in the end, only what they want to believe, and do not care to trouble themselves any further with truthful details. It’s simpler that way, comforting really. Observational evidence will not convince them to change their minds. To use an example from the natural world, through the years many gardeners and even some professional horticulturists have believed that watering plants in sunshine will scorch the plants’ leaves on account of a supposed magnifying lens effect from water droplets.

Not only has this myth been scientifically disproved, but the evidence there is no validity in it is plain for anyone to see who has watered annual flowering plants tightly packed in a hanging basket or pot. No escaping getting water on the foliage there, and those plants appear to get along alright, and better than they would if the worried gardener had withheld the spray of water waiting for a cloudy day. Yet many continue to believe, because they would rather believe the story their mind and culture invents for them than what the plants themselves are showing. We’re alright! Thanks for the water on a hot, sunny day! Here’s a rainbow for your trouble!
— Ed.

 

Worse than Foot in Mouth

The pejorative expression “liberal media” has become a time-worn truth for some people after it has been repeated often enough, mostly by themselves. To them, attributing a news story to the “liberal media” is as good as saying the story is worthless. Their listeners are meant to take at face value the assertion that the media has a liberal bias, because they themselves never question the phrase. Of course the media has a liberal bias, because everyone says it does.

At least everyone within a certain circle says it does, and the people within that circle repeat the formula ad nauseum. Citing facts to these people about how the major media outlets are controlled by as few as a half dozen corporations, all of them concerned with promoting business rather than any leftist agenda, has no effect on them. They are addicted to the drug of blaming the faults of their right wing leaders on a mythical “liberal media”. Individual reporters within the big media corporations often lean to the left, but it does not follow that their personal views find their way into print or onto television or radio. The editors, who have their ears tuned to the desires of their corporate bosses, would not allow it, and they set the parameters for what will be in a news story and, more importantly, what will not.


Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson (1931-2012), officially White House Special Counsel in the Nixon administration, but unofficially the director of dirty tricks. After being sent to prison for seven months for his role in the Watergate scandal, he got religion.

Consumers of news media have no idea what is being left out, what questions are not being asked, and what assumptions are not being challenged. It is what a news organization leaves out that determines its political bias, more than what it releases for consumption. Yes, a newspaper may endorse the Republican or Democratic candidate for office, but what about the idea that neither candidate represents with sincerity any interests other than those of the business class that donated the largest sums to their campaigns? What about in the run-up to war in Iraq in 2003 the reality that there was very little skepticism of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war from supposedly liberal media outlets like The New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)? To persist in labeling such organizations “liberal media” belies not only a willful ignorance of the facts, but a bent in political philosophy that is so far rightward it makes Rush Limbaugh appear centrist.

 

Before the 1950s, major media outlets were seen for what they were then and still are today – centrist or right-leaning organizations that were interested in a healthy bottom line, without investigating too deeply into the feathered nests of the owners’ wealthy friends in government and business. Starting in the 1950s with critical reporting of racial atrocities in the South, and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s with critical reporting on the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the CIA, the major media strayed from it’s generally cozy relationship with the powers that be. It was an anomalous twenty to thirty years, and the Nixon administration sought to rein in the press using, among other tools and dirty tricks, the “liberal media” propaganda lie, repeated often. By the 1980s and the Reagan administration, a cowed press corps had reverted to previous form. By 2003, it would be difficult to distinguish the uncritical cheerleading among the press corps for the Iraq War from the rah rah press reports at the beginning of the Spanish-American War a little more than a hundred years earlier.

Harvey Korman and Slim Pickens brainstorm on the kinds of people they need to help them destroy the fictional western town of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Blazing Saddles. No mention of any “very fine people” among them, however. Warning: foul language.

 

The “liberal media” excuse is a handy one, and some people will cling to it no matter how badly the current Oval Office occupant behaves or how heinous the words coming out of his mouth or from his Twitter tirades. Anyone who continues to excuse him by blaming the “liberal media” for slanting the words the president himself uttered in response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, is in denial about the situation and is suffering from cranial rectumitis so severe that no one else should have to listen any longer.
― Vita

A case of cranial rectumitis.