Derelictic Dialectics

While surfing the web today in the usual way

I stumbled upon a dispute in some political fray;

seems it was a matter of some current politics,

rendered hot and bothered by fringish  dialectics.

 

The dispute’s gravity has been magnified beyond repair

due to polarizing factions that foment both fair and unfair.

Populists spurt rants irresponsibly in fact-check neglect;

indignant apparatchiks would impose politically correct.

 

Who’s to say what’s a fact and what is not

in the midst of this politico-cultural polyglot?

Fact-checking technocrats want censoring rules

assuming the populist rabble to be unschooled fools.

 

If I had to choose between political correctness

and uninformed opinion  that’s incorrect  and reckless,

I’d opt for the unrestrained, the free and eclectic

instead of the censured, the tamed and restrained derelictic.

 

Some say democracy will end in chaos and confusion

with too many fringies spurting fake news and delusion,

but really, the slide toward our enslavement will commence

with self-appointed fake-checkers who in fact are quite dense.

 

Because freedom to think, to speak and to act, is the stuff of liberty,

more essential than cubicles of fact-checking drones who decree

that this or that fact is not fact but in fact it is fake

and thereby impose conformity that the people can’t take.

 

While surfing the web today in the usual way,

oh, let me stumble into some free folk at play,

where the ass and the elephant freely roam

to make fools of themselves ’til the cows come home.

 

King of Soul

"The Press"

Our world was forever changed when, about 577 years ago, Johann Gutenberg devised an effective way to reproduce printed documents. His invention enabled the printer man to apply controlled mechanical pressure to an inked image in a manner that facilitated efficient multiple printings.

When the printer man repeatedy applied "the press" (more about this later) to those blank pages, the world was changed forever.

Gutenberg's innovation enabled printers to print multiple editions of documents and books. Our Library of Congress recently displayed a centuries-old Bible that was printed by means of the Gutenberg innovation.

The printing industry progressed rapidly. It wasn't very long before books and other documents were being churned out all over the world in great numbers.

Books have changed the world.

Our fascination with the stories, literature and information we find in books has revolutionized the way we live. In the late 1800s, the American artist John Frederick Peto painted this image of a pile of books. His picture, recently displayed in our National Gallery of Art, captures the fascination that I find within those printed pages.

The spread of printing throughout the globe induced an information revolution that has affected the way we think about, and do, just about everything. As people became more and more literate, news of the times we live in became a larger and larger factor in the ways people think about the world. People in the modern world use news and contemporary information to inform their decisions, and modify their strategies for living life successfully.

News became such an obsessive element in our modern life that large institutions were built for the purpose of informing people about what's happening in our world.

Those massive news-spouting institutions now find themselves being cornered into a different role. The big picture of 21st-century information dispersal is being turned on its ear by an unruly multiplicity of online mini-sources. This development is along the lines of what George Orwell called the "brave new world."

Actually, it's the wild, wild West out there. What we have now is like a million Okies hightailing it across the internet prairie, every one of us hell-bound to claim our little stake of the cyber-dirt that's now being divvied up for the media of the masses.

Or "dictatorship of the proletariat", if that's what rings your chimes.

It used to be that "The Press" was all those journalists and editors who gathered and published the news on a daily basis.

But not any more. Our meaning of "the press" is now something else entirely, and I'm not sure how to define or describe it.

But I do surmise that our new understanding of "the press" has something to with that collective pressure applied by reporters on public spokespersons.

Here's an example. Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, argues with The Press about how many people showed up for the inauguration.

That's The Press now, and this disconnect between "us" and "them" is the new "news."

Lastly, as Uncle Walter might have said:

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, January 24, 2017.



Glass half-Full