|
at one level, charlatan is right--one way to see this is as a huge breakdown in journalism---the major television "news" networks did not check out their sources. whether there was collusion or not is in the air--but they did not check out the sources. period.
what i'm amazed at in the thread is that so few are even willing to acknowledge that much.
there are systemic problems with how the american major media operate--there are an illusion of critique which is of a piece with the illusion of relatively unproblematic information--and unproblematic information is central to the coherent functioning of a democratic polity. the idea is that the polity, confronted with information, is capable of deliberating and acting on what results from that deliberation. in the states, deliberation is collapsed mostly into a logic of consumer choices. in the states, "democracy" is like shopping. in the states, there is no democratic polity: and it seems that alot of folk who have posted to the thread are just fine with that--rationalize it away, pretend it isn't so--of make no coherent arguments and just attack host. personally, i think the states is a soft authoritarian state ruled by an oligarchy that engages in rituals of faction rotation every 2 years, with the major cycle unfolding every 4 years. there is little meaningful difference between the factions. there is little ideological diversity at all in the states--there is much in the way of diversity of opinion, and if you talk to people they have views that range well beyond what they are told to think--but then again they also accept the idea that the oligarchy is diversity and that faction rotation is enough and that democracy can happen with systematically distorted information.
well, it can't.
rationalize it if you like, but politically this is a fucking problem.
a soft authoritarian regime in which the official political discourse is democratic is a *problem* because it continually sows the expectations that the ideological arrangement is other than it is---at certain points, the gap separating ideology and the facts of the matter surface--this is one of them--but it is hardly unique--and what's funny is that confronted with this gap, alot of folk don't seem to care.
so we don't really have a democratic polity even, if tfp is any indication of what's abroad in the land--we have a polity made up largely of people who live in an illusion and like that illusion and know that it is an illusion, but they like the illusion, so the problem really is anyone who says that it is an illusion, not that it is an illusion.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|