Two Points of View: Reason and Unreason

Below, these few lines represent the way the left and right (by whatever definition), whether liberal, conservative, or conspirator, view the “other” American in our polis today. Unreason today, nourished primarily by FACEBOOK, has mesmerized and turned part of the electorate into “cultists” or “conspirators” who disbelieve their own participation in the science-techno world ,wherein they spread the rumors of their own existence.

The Voters and THE propaganda model

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky formulated a propaganda model hypothesis for analyzing the media which: “attempts to explain the performances of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate…the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful society interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is not normally accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” (Wikipedia)


The Problem

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” —William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The Solution

But, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, in Nov. 1863: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Lincoln didn’t stop there, referring to the occasion of Americans slaughtering Americans, dead soldiers, he said: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address signaled Lincoln’s re-dedication to the Declaration of Independence and the ideals, today no longer the singular possession of White Men but the celebration of dignity accorded diverse human beings: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [human beings] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

(Re-read the Declaration and you will see the criticism aimed King George seems prophetic of today’s disagreements with Trump I (AKA El Viro).

Voting

When early voting starts, I shall stand in line, book in hand, until I cast my vote. And I will think about the way John Lewis got his head cracked in Selma and how the cops shoot down black people the way the KKK used to hang “Strange Fruit” from trees in the South and the way Trump puts children in cages. I shall vote against savage behavior and for the concept of “Justice for All.”