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First part of a two-part conversation with Marshall Poe of New Books Network, on A History of Communications, Wikipedia, not being the next Malcolm Gladwell, contesting the effects media, attributes of the media, speech, writing, print, radio, and Internet, media and social organization, giving rise to new forms of culture, the psychological effects of reading, media and the configuration of consciousness, the ability to manipulate symbols, literacy as memory aid, the inception of science, the accumulation effect, the psyche & the self, words and images, audio and visual culture & image suffusion, the deadening effects of pornography, video game generation, the erosion of self-regulation, a gluttonous society, the pursuit of appetites, the “Is” determines the “Ought,” changing assassination policy in the US, convenience killing and the entertainment industry, a preference for watching, an aversion for reading, Plato’s injunction against writing, visual stimuli, mirror neurons, psychology and biology, an absence of a reading organ, language and autism, autism and a lack of grooves, the language implant, life in the matrix, adolescence and imprinting, Seen and Not Seen, Clint Eastwood & Robert Redford, cold flow, brain plasticity, the complexity of social situations, autism and mimesis, unconscious competence, TV as calming agent, using TV for relaxation, the human need for distraction, the torture of words, family as drama machines, the purpose of the State & the pursuit of happiness, the Christian drive to colonize, gay marriage & changing mores in the US, obscenity legislation in Wichita.
Songs: “The Kommema and his Religion,” by SunWalker; “Orlando,” by Rick Bain.
cliffhanger ! hopefully a cheeky response like :
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the American Pie.”
or
“Huey Lewis & the News & the Power of Love is the Law.”
Ha ha!
Good discussion with interesting topics—interested to hear how the next discussion will start (“cliffhanger!” as MikeB says above!). Marshall Poe’s comment about “thank God for TV, imagine what people would be doing without it” could certainly be argued with, but I guess I can see where he’s coming from. I see a lot of truth-seeking activists act like humanity is just basically wonderful, and that problems only arise when mean, greedy tyrants oppress all us Good Folk—-so it is interesting and necessary to consider that maybe certain social-control mechanisms, though distasteful, are indeed useful for distracting & numbing the populace, as an unpleasant but real fact of organizing a complex human society…
But he lost me a bit with his stance on the benign nature of the U.S. State & empire, that we get to “kick them out every 4 years”, as if the power of the Deep State is no more firmly & insidiously entrenched than that. And the idea that gay rights was a meaningful, organic result of popular will to which a leader like Obama simply had to acquiesce also seems quite naive. Seems more realistic to regard it as a sop thrown to the public, to provide the illusion of progress, and also to Divide & Conquer along Liberal/Conservative fault lines (embroiling us in arguments over transgender bathrooms, etc.). Interested to hear how the discussion unfolds in the next installment.
Marshall seems to participate of the pre-paranoid world/view of the privileged class & yet has been open to an influx of my own post-paranoid world-view at his New Books Network which suggests (as did this talk, I think) that he is able to take on new information pretty fast. Kunstler is another example of someone who is very knowledgeable while at the same time, IMO, naive, yet whom I enjoy connecting to across that (apparent) perceptual/interpretative abyss.
It’s good to hear that he’s open to new info. And I can sympathize with him, really—seems to me that professors & academics can have some serious blind-spots when it comes to big-picture topics, just like anyone else, but sometimes even more so… They’re used to dealing with intelligent people, and feeling like they’re amongst the cream of the intellectual crop, so it’s very easy for them to ignore ‘fringe’,/’conspiracy’-laden viewpoints coming from outside of that world, from intellectual ‘commoners’, so to speak. The attitude is often, “Well if you don’t have a PhD in x/y/z, then I won’t waste my time on your uneducated opinion or untrustworthy information on the matter.” Good to hear that Marshall Poe might not be so dismissive as that.
For academics and members of the “professional” class, there’s always the subconscious danger posed by dissident/heretical ideas—-the unspoken (often un-thought) threat of, “Well even if there MIGHT be something to these claims, I wouldn’t want to risk my reputation on it, and it would only alienate me from my colleagues or students anyway, so I should probably just ignore it.”
I have a couple academic relatives whom I basically use as a mental template when thinking about the type of person I’m describing, and it’s hard for me to imagine such people ever bothering to explore something like 9/11, for example. What’s most disheartening is not their understandable bias (arising from unfamiliarity) against such a ‘wacky’ idea, nor their free-time being too limited to permit such seemingly fruitless mental wanderings, but the fact that—deep down—they don’t even seem interested in such big topics, *even if* there is something to them. Reputation, keeping up appearances, and staying comfy in the middle-class pleasure-dome/bubble of “enlightened academia” always seems to trump exploring risky & uncomfortable realities—-they’re so used to looking at themselves as educated/enlightened, that they lose sight of logical principles, and fall back on fallacious axioms such as, “That kind of thing could never happen, and I would have heard about it if it had…and even if it’s true, what am I supposed to do about it?”
Perhaps it’s just my own shallow stereotypical image of academicians, but it seems to me that they often enjoy being regarded as intellectuals more than they value Truth—-a PhD is surely a sign of intellect and much hard-work, but is often prized as a sort of ultimate boy-scout badge, with the drive behind it being just as superficial & childish. Again, I’m not saying Marshall Poe falls into this category, just that many academics seem to.
While I agree with much of this, I’d say that academics at least have an obligation to respect other academic materials and so in a certain sense academia seems to be the field MOST open to unofficial historical readings, not counting the alt. perceptions media, obviously, which is probably even more heavily infiltrated than academia. The problem is that because of things you raise above, academics are notoriously slow on the uptake, hence academic books about the JFK assassination have only started appearing in the past decade or two. But once these subjects are addressed, they suddenly have a legitimacy which is useful when countering the non-academic, intellectual elite who continue to scoff at anything that doesn’t make the NY Times and remain blissfully oblivious of their own ignorance. Ritual & organized abuse is a good example of something that is discussed only in the alt. perceptions media and in academia, with very little in the larger middle between. Academia is its own margin in this regard, hence I feel like I fit better at the New Books Network than anywhere else besides my own space.
Soma, anyone? Big Brother State just wants us all to be blissed out! On the United States as savvy empire builder: 19th-century Manifest Destiny to destroy and defraud Native Americans of their bison and lands as well as the Mexicans of Texas and California–the Mexican-American war preceded the Civil War and was the training ground for U.S.Grant and other Civil War generals and leaders who earned their stinking badges, although Grant’s memoirs are worth reading and indicated that he had grave moral reservations about the war with Mexico–the Spanish-American War in the late 19th-century in which we acquired The Philippines, the war with Columbia in which we “liberated” Panama and built the Panama Canal, that essential machine of world empire that enabled our ships to rapidly transit the hemispheres in pursuit of world domination–oh, I forgot the naval/mercantile conquest of Japan by Perry…and, of course the Monroe Doctrine, another 19th-century commotion that announced to the world, well, Europe really, that South America was solely the concern of the United States; it later became a point of policy under Kennedy with the Soviet Union over the Bay of Pigs that nearly lead to a nuclear exchange–and all that happened before World War I!
Recommended reading: Gore Vidal’s novels _Burr_, Lincoln_, _1876_, _Washington, D.C_, or anything by Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn’s _People’s History of the United States_.