"The Medium is the Message" ----Marshall McLuhan.
I
was listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning, and they
had a segment on the civil war in Rwanda in the 1990's. The war began
with hate radio and led to the destruction of social norms. In the
aftermath, radio adopted a sitcom involving intermarriage between the
tribes. Studies done by a professor at Princeton reveal that while
the media didn't change the prejudice, it did change norms restoring
the nation to more civilized behavior. Behavior is, apparently,
determined much more by social norms than by prejudice. There are
lessons here. Talk radio--hate radio--Limbaugh, Alex Jones et. al.,
have been eroding social and political norms for decades resulting
not only in the explosion in the number of hate groups in this
country but in the elevation of Caesar Disgustus to the throne. In
this sense tRUMP is not an aberration but a symptom of the illness
inflicted by hate radio and fixed noise.
Impeaching and imprisoning our Caesar Disgustus is a necessary act because he is a clear and present danger. But it is not enough. We must clean up our public discourse by shutting down talk radio and bringing objective reporting back into the forum.
It is no mere coincidence that radio brought Hitler to power as it did the genocide in Africa. Radio is a 'hot' medium, that is, it is one-directional and involves minimum participation by the audience as a lecture differs from a dialogue. McLuhan included film and photography (especially high resolution photography) as 'hot mediums. He identified as 'cool' mediums such as television, newsprint and cartoons because they were low resolution, drawing the participant or audience into them rather than shouting at them. In our age ,with high definition, television is becoming a hot medium. For the implications of this read Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media", in which he concludes that the rise of fascism would not have occurred in the age of television because while radio is conducive to expressing anger and rage (because it is a hot medium), Hitler and Mussolini would have come across a laughable cartoon, albeit dangerous figures, on television in low definition black and white. It is no coincidence then, that Nixon, who had a face and voice for radio--and indeed, those who listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won-- would lose to Kennedy in 1960 but win in 1968 because television has gained higher resolution with the addition of color. With the advent of high definition, television now poses the same threat as radio for being a medium conducive to the transmission of rage and discontent. Enter Faux News.
It
is not benign, and it is not neutral for, as McCluhan taught us so
many years ago, media is the message. That is, it is not content
that determines the message but the media itself. In this case it is
the media that amplifies and legitimizes rage. Therefore, how it is
used becomes critical and the the greater society has every right to
insist that it be used responsibly.
The
other lesson from the Rwandan experience is that it isn't
prejudice
that produces the genocide. It is the destruction of social norms,
which the "Idiot Wrong" have been celebrating for nearly a
half-century. Caesar Disgustus is all about destroying norms and
therefore is an existential threat not only to the republic but to
civilization itself.
"An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh"
Impeach
and Imprison
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