The Politics of White Noise

President Richard B. Cheney with unidentified assistant.

My post description mentions politics, which means exposing the contents of my brain matter on this matter, which resembles nothing so much as extra-finely ground sausage derived from all the animal parts of all available species. In other words, you really don’t want to know everything that’s there, believe me: “Why does Hillary Clinton sound like my mom telling me to clean up my room?” "Yes, if I were a girl, I could take Barack Obama home to my parents, but would that make him the president we need?"

I long ago shunned any association with political and religious extremists and fanatics, long before the rise of President Cheney and Lord Bin Laden but no matter how I stiffen my arm and supplement it with a ten-foot pole, their voices, strident with righteous certainty and bruised with resentment, seem to dominate the discourse, especially in this medium of the Internet: this playground for digital nihilism.

How do I write about politics without sounding like I’m merely murmuring assent to something I scanned from Keithiana Huffpolbermann or Stevjon Colwart? How do I avoid sinking to crackpotism, all cross-eyed passion and self-ennobling, but murderous purpose. With many of the blogs and comments I review—though not all of them-- real worldisms like gravity, death and the air we breathe start to look like mere opinion: there are people who never die, objects that never fall and the astronauts float in space, free of even oxygen.

Take the war in Iraq (please): there are numerous positions a mind can take. Supposedly, the more educated one is on this matter, the more solid the ground the opinion stands on. But then there's the supposedly well-educated expert William Kristol of The National Review. Being not at the center of events, either in Bagdad or Washington D.C. myself, but in desolate Emeryville, California, I’m forced to form my opinions from the experience and expertise of those who stand closer to the fire. I feel like a short man in the back of a large crowd, dependent on the whispers coming in from far away. Even so, no matter how hard they try, the war’s supporters continue to sound more and more unhinged with every passing casualty. “We now seem to be on course to a successful outcome,” declares Kristol (Modern conservatives: the new crazy-hippie potheads).

I don’t have much confidence, even in the people I agree with and, especially, in those, who both fiercely love and passionately hate them, whether it be President Cheney or Cindy Sheehan. In the online world, on its many blogs, wrath and resentment is what fuels most discourse. Anyone can turn into a troll—yes, me, too. And I’m ashamed of my trollness, but here, this environment of uninhibited voices, regrets sound as loud as a flower’s breath. It is too much nuance and it indicates a surrender of power.

The digital world is made up of ones and zeros, eithers and ors and so, it seems, are most of the
minds that occupy it. Nuance is missed altogether or regarded with suspicion. “We need to take al Qaida real seriously” can be read as code for “I love President Cheney!”; “Impeach President Cheney” becomes “Yay al Qaida!” My real point of both those original propositions, which I firmly believe, seems to have a better chance registering in traditional print. Even “President Cheney” to most blog readers, is evidence of ignorance and not the dour satire I intend. I say “one;” You say “zero.” I say “zero” you say “one.” That’s how it is. Maybe I should leave. Or maybe I should see if anyone has the brains and balls to throw me off. But that would take too much thought and work, wouldn’t it? Better to keyboard “asshole!” and hit “Send.” That’ll show me!

Don’t believe everything you think: Considering my reality-based experience, words of wisdom.
ORRRRR: Isn't it really just an elitist attack on the already damaged self-esteem of the disenfranchised and the powerless? Who am I to challenge the beliefs of others? After all, wasn’t it so-called “expert” scientists whose decisions led to both space shuttle disasters . . . why, they might even have done it on purpose! If you can think it, it’s true. And once you say it in public, it can become even more true. Paranoia is therapy. The most reasoned, evidence-based argument cannot penetrate the armor of a deluded certainty.

The Internet seems to like nonsense memes. Where this commons is concerned, Yeats is right. The center cannot hold, because, in this case, there isn’t one. Some of the blogosphere’s most ardent supporters believe they are supporting the vanguard of some sort of village square democracy, a true conversation among people that will lead to progress. But Cheney supporters, Matt Drudge, al Qaida and other tyrants and totalitarians believe something else and they all use the Internet, too: Very well, from what I understand. The Internet works better as soapbox for the mad than as a forum for serious thought, useful ideas and sly, subtle wit. I will continue to read The New Yorker.

The Internet is amoral. Not only does it, in itself, lack any kind of moral content, its consequences are both good and bad. Like hammer that can be used to build a house, or for murder, it’s indifferent to good intentions. From where I keyboard, this battle has no end, until, at least, the power grid that civilization so deeply depends on melts down and humans creep back to our fire-lit caves.

The liberal blogosphere’s belief in the power of good to overcome the Internet’s core amorality is based on the, sad-to-say, false assumption of Universal Human Goodness. This amorality, and its consequences, cannot be explained away anymore than al Qaida can. Especially here, on the Internet, this commons, where every comment has equal voice and it all adds up to a sizzling fury of white noise.

The Great Nostalgia Mashup

So many are writing about the Summer of Love this summer, I figure I might as well, too. Sure, I remember 1967. Yes, I witnessed the Summer of Love . . . on a 24-inch black and white RCA TV in a tiny living room on a second floor apartment in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Honestly, my memories of that summer amount to a small pile of (mostly) feces. I may been a little baffled and sacred of the silvery shadowy broadcasts of hairy people running around the streets and the newscasters’ mutterings about a mysterious far off land called “Berkeley.” (“You must’ve been stoned,” you snicker. “No,” I snicker back, “but I shoulda been.”)

Memory tells me that, in the summer of ’67, I was an alienated and strident 12-year-old Republican-in-Training and Vietnam War supporter. Just the year before, I’d been removed from my Tom Sawyer/Christopher Robin world to a midwestern town that was as flat and dreary as a parking lot. While everyone liked the Rolling Stones, I liked Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. (Why I had the attitudes, tastes, and opinions I did is grist for another mill. Except for Ennio Morricone, I made a lot of bad picks that year.)

That summer, I paid my annual visit to my father, who was then living in Coral Gables, Florida, in a ranch style house in a suburban neighborhood. It was—unlike rural south central Texas, where I spent two previous summers—extremely humid. Like Oshkosh, it was very flat. For a natural wanderer, there was little to wander around in. The days seemed mostly empty.

I remember early morning weekend fishing trips on my father’s 18-footer, “The Hindri” in Biscayne Bay. I liked those trips: an incredible cornucopia of fish in good numbers, even though it was out of season. Words like “overfishing” and “global warming” had yet to haunt our world. I loved the thunderstorms that sailed in over the Bay and how the distant columns of rain plunged down from the billowing purple clouds and made the storms look like atomic explosions: My innocence indicates a certain lack of moral awareness.

That’s pretty much all the nostalgia, except for a bookstore located a few blocks away where I bought novelizations of the Get Smart TV series with my allowance. (No, they weren’t funny. Nor do I regret their loss.)

Most people missed the Summer of Love and still had a swell time that year: Maybe even a better one. But there are those who didn’t: rioters in Newark, soldiers in Vietnam. And the Vietnamese themselves. Not to mention all those lost alienated adolescents.

During the 1990s, I joined the Retro-Swing scene. I had a great time wearing that snappy early twentieth-century fashion and swinging to that swinging brassy music. One of our crowd declared he wished that he had lived in the 1920s and 1930s, instead of now. That nostalgia was rightfully mocked: our friend would also have lived through the Great Depression; World War II; The Holocaust—and don’t forget the great dental care.

But that’s not denying good things happened then (like Duke Ellington). Nor is it wrong to wish that the best of those good things were with us now. I recall watching George W. Bush’s first televised speech after 9/11 and sorely wishing for a time machine to bring back Franklin Roosevelt, because he was the one we needed to hear that night. My reaction may not even have been nostalgic, but a sense that we were in bigger trouble than we realized, even then.

I know: We‘re stuck right now with the Completely-Not-FDR, but I wouldn’t dispense with nostalgia. So much of human culture, especially art, music, poetry, fiction, and especially memoir—would be impossible without its misty, sin-sweetened ambience. (We would, for example, miss the shimmering iridescent prose of Vladimir Nabokov.) Without nostalgia, memory would be a pure mechanical function. Houses wouldn’t be homes, but mere rock shelters. Burning away the past makes swell ranting rhetoric, but no one’s ever been able to live with the results as a tour of social realist monuments in post-Communist Europe might show.

Nostalgia also lies and sprinkles its golden dust over evil: Both Nazism and Bin Ladenism are nostalgias for a past that never existed: medieval utopias that demand the extermination of millions living now in order to rebirth those Halcyon Days of Whatever.

When I remember the past, I’m sometimes confronted with how good and evil, happiness and regret, so often twine together. Pulling up a good memory sometimes pulls up a bad one, a very living (and horny, hungry, and angry) corpse, from its grave. Getting lost in the past can mean failure to make the best of now and leave something better for tomorrow. (Right now, somewhere, someone, maybe my age, sits in his couch, watching the complete DVD set of The Brady Bunch. What pleasure will this memory give him on his death bed?)

I think it was Brendan Gill, in an article on architectural preservation in The New Yorker some years back, who said the point of preserving the past was not to bring back a supposedly better time, but to enhance our own. To that, I’d add that those who live in whatever future is coming might like to find a treasure to remember our times by. Whatever good and new things we make now, might count sweetly in tomorrow’s memory.

(Photos from Dave Harper; 120 negative; Virginia University; the National Archives)