In a way, this diary is a follow up to Jerome's excellent diary on Why Bother?, but this is something I was tumbling around my head today, and it fits very well into his topic of the day. Basically, he says:
Why don't others just see it? Are we crazy? Are we actually extremists, out of touch with the rest of humanity?
Why are we so few in thinking that torture is wrong? That selfishness should be tempered? That there is such a thing as the common good? Why are we so few to care? How do we fight the fact that's it's easier to just tune out?
I was thinking about this very issue today too. And I think I may have figured out the answer. It's below the flip.
I followed the James Frey/Oprah story with great interest. Why? Not because I could give a shit about the lying, plaigarizing author. I saw it because it showed how unfazed the American public has become to lying.
Here's a guy who admitted to puttingfiction in memoir, which purports to be ture. However, an army of Oprah "spinmeisters" - followed up, finally, by an appearance by the head spinmeister, the big "O", on Larry King Live - has somehow spun this tale of fiction in his memoir as somehow being OK. As of right now, Mr. Plaigarist is sitting at #2 on Amazon's Top 100 list. Frey, and Oprah's, ability to sell books, somehow, has remained intact.
It's fascinating. Here's a guy who admitted that he put fiction in his book, which would be enough to put most writers back to waiting tables. But since Oprah somehow might be embarassed by this, all of a sudden Frey gets the PR event of the year, and a bestselling book. All because he lied!
Why don't people care that his memoir has fiction in it? If I owned any books by this joker, I'd have burned my first editions and vowed to never read him again. But people remembered the name, forgot the controversy, and continue to buy the book. It was in the news cycle for about a week, reported, and then the next Bush White House affront to decency came in the news, and everyone forgot.
It's no great feat of genius to say that we live in a society nowadays that is super-saturated with information and news. You can get any news, however you want, whatever you want, basically whenever you want it. Between cable TV news, network news, newspapers, blogs, and websites, if anything happens in the world we can find out about it fast. You get partisan news, real news, fake news, sports news, celebrity news. The chatter is deafening.
It's a firehose. People basically tune out from the news basically because there is so much of it to absorb - more than anybody can absorb.
In this world of having too much information to absorb, the key is no longer to be truthful, just like Frey and Oprah. The key is to stick to your guns, and wait out the news cycle. And that's what the Bush Administration is doing.
Clearly the strategy of the administration is to keep the firehose jacked up to the maximum, keeping all the talking points and the national agenda clogged with their own issues. Does it matter if they're right or wrong, legal or illegal? Not at all.
Case in point: Did we really not know that Dick Cheney was going to defend the administration on secret and illegal wiretapping? Of course not. Cheney simply delivers what everyone is expecting him to say. He's not saying it to win over friends. He's saying it to project power, and to give the illusion that the Administration (some, like me would say that he) is in control of the situation. He's projecting the agenda of lies, bullshit, dictatorship, and bullshit.
It's not a national "debate". It's one side, saying what we expect them to say, waiting out the news cycle. They are counting on the fact that there's always a new outrage next week. Maybe someone will expose themselves in the Super Bowl, or maybe there will be a new disqualification in "American Idol". They know there's no attention span.
To answer Jerome's question: how do we fight the fact that it's easier to tune out? The answer is: to pick our issues, keep them narrow, and keep our focus up. In ways, even dailykos is a firehose - Alito one day, Jerome's talk about energy policy the next. Maybe it's time to make new blogs that may be only one issue, but crank up the volume.
We can get a big enough bullhorn to scream the truth. Patience Jerome.