If we had but world enough, and time....
Well, lemme point out one thing, anyway. I really can't take a lot of time on this right now, but: I remember the Seventies without fondness. We had a so-called "conservative" President that imposed wage and price controls, "safety" regulations, "revenue sharing" which turned the states into whores for DC money, followed by an unelected President and Vice President, the Young Turk Democratic takeover of Congress, the cutoff of South Vietnam, the rape of Cambodia, the rise of Jimmah, the loss of the Panama Canal, and the fall of Iran. I was in the Birch Society in those days, and I saw how hard it was to get people to open their eyes and see the thousand Lilliputian threads that were tying them down as the socialists marched us on to certain ruin.
Well, they were turned back. I still remember Congress extending the deadline for the ERA with 35 ratifications and three more needed (which they couldn't get!). For a while, it seemed as though the whole thing might turn around, but the media pressure continued, reframing, redefining, and shall we say, lying? all the while. Until we eventually got the DIRTXPOTUS.
Again, I remember the atmosphere at the time, the private conversations in suburbia, etc. I couldn't believe that Reaganism could have "worn off" so quickly, how people who had so much to lose could be so besotted by der Schlickmeister. Well, again, the socialists were turned back, by the 1994 Contract With America.
Slick was a tough opponent, and he knew how to play the media (who happily let themselves be played), so the promise of 1994 fell somewhat short. But then, Slick fell on his own troubles, and his own charisma failed at the crucial moment when Saint Al should have inherited the sacred mantle, and we got the trifecta of 2000.
Except that the trifecta was slightly "defecta". I had been a party activist for nearly 20 years at this point, and was sickened at the spinelessness of my own party, rolling over for Senate power-sharing when firm resolution was called for. The W Administration seemed to blow this way and that with every breeze from the NYT, and it appeared that the socialists would get their way even in defeat. Then came 9/11.
No sooner had W declared our goals and set to win them, the socialist establishment set itself to defeat him and them. Rathergate (2004) was a major failure for them, and should have told them what was coming. Thousands of conservative internet activists, tapping at keyboards in their pajamas, brought down one of the pillars of information control in this country.
The information establishment reacted with a full-court press to vilify Bush and eventually to install our current pres_ent. While they succeeded in that effort, it's a Pyrrhic victory. 0bama is not a statesman, nor a politician, nor even a half-decent manager, and his very success is going to torpedo him and everybody in his camp. Because the resistance I see rising now is several orders of magnitude greater than what I saw in the Seventies or Nineties. And, unlike his predecessors, 0bama is going to run into it head-on, and blindly.
A particular difference between now and the Seventies is that many folks are getting information now from radio and the Internet, which are verbal media, well-suited to logical argumentation. Flimsy structures and flaccid logic quickly get called out in this environment; whereas, in the Seventies, it was all TV, which works with flashing images, emotional presentation, and was dominated by Walter Cronkite (need I say more about that?)
When newspapers and radio were dethroned by TV, using its emotional imagery to overthrow logic and common sense, the country took a noticeable turn toward the left. A return to print and straight discourse will almost certainly turn us back the other way; no matter that dead trees are no longer involved (newsprint).
Does this make sense to anybody? I can give sources for further reading, especially on the print vs. image angle.
Well, you membership in the Birch Society says a lot. I do not subscribe to all of the society’s beliefs, theories, but they certainly have valid arguments.
“The information establishment reacted with a full-court press to vilify Bush and eventually to install our current pres_ent. While they succeeded in that effort, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. 0bama is not a statesman, nor a politician, nor even a half-decent manager, and his very success is going to torpedo him and everybody in his camp. Because the resistance I see rising now is several orders of magnitude greater than what I saw in the Seventies or Nineties. And, unlike his predecessors, 0bama is going to run into it head-on, and blindly.”
Wholeheartedly agree.
“A particular difference between now and the Seventies is that many folks are getting information now from radio and the Internet, which are verbal media, well-suited to logical argumentation. Flimsy structures and flaccid logic quickly get called out in this environment; whereas, in the Seventies, it was all TV, which works with flashing images, emotional presentation, and was dominated by Walter Cronkite (need I say more about that?)”
Spot on, and no, you need not say more about Walter.
” When newspapers and radio were dethroned by TV, using its emotional imagery to overthrow logic and common sense, the country took a noticeable turn toward the left. A return to print and straight discourse will almost certainly turn us back the other way; no matter that dead trees are no longer involved (newsprint).”
This is, in part, true. But we can’t start from there. You can take away all the entertainment tech. all you want, but unless our children are classically educated, we’re sunk. There’s a reason why tyrants like Mao, Hitler, and the like focus on our youth, and that’s because they youth are our future.
Conservatives must remove their children from public schools. Return to Biblical foundations and classical education.
“Does this make sense to anybody?”
Absolutely.