Censorship Is a Tool of Those in Power

100 years ago you could not read James Joyce's Ulysses. It was declared obscene. Many other books were deemed such so that for liberal authors "Banned In Boston" was a badge of honor. The books were banned because a Conservative worldview was dominant, and preserving "family values" was deemed to be something important.

The Sixties became a hinge-point because this predominant view of "normal" was now being challenged. What was being pursued on all fronts was a new permissiveness, with purportedly new values. Free speech, free love, freedom to protest the actions of our government were all part of this new wave. 

These thoughts came to mind as I read this stimulating article by Ed West, The West's Cultural Revolution Is Over. His premise is very direct: The Left has won.

His arguments are persuasive. One point he makes is that the rules of censorship are defined by those who have the power.  Today, the Left decides what is censored. Cancel Culture is just a nickname that softens things a little because "Censorship" is a bad word. 

The list of trigger words is growing longer by the day. Yesterday the poor Gypsy Moth has to be given another name, according to a NYTimes story. Recently even the word "Trigger" in "Trigger Words" has been banned because of its association with guns. I'm not sure what we're supposed to say, but whatever it is will likely change by next year.

Here's an observation from the article:

The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticize. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism...

No one would satirize the transgender movement today; no one would dare point fun at BLM, or Pride month; no one would dare joke about George Floyd, because like the publishers of Gay Times in 1977, they might face jail for blasphemy.  Instead leading satirist Sacha Baron Cohen makes a living making jokes at the expense of the little people. Indeed the only satire made now pokes fun at the old establishment, like punching the corpse of a once-ferocious zoo animal, or the people who still hold the old beliefs; the elderly, the less educated, the rural and provincial. The powerless.

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THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG POST was to encourage you to click on this link and check out the full essay. I've only shared here a few brief snippets. You'll want to read the piece in its entirety. CLICK HERE

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Related Links

Putting Marxism In Perspective: Brief Interview with Economics Professor Evan Osborne

He Who Controls the Narrative Controls the People

The Brandeis Language Police (Story from The Atlantic)

Tech Tuesday: The 5G Conspiracy

Back in the 90s, Minnesota Power was seeking to shore up its power resources by adding a backup connection to the grid that comes out of Chicago. What this meant was the addition of a corridor of high tension wires across Wisconsin.

As you might expect, there were plenty of people opposed to this. "Not in my back yard" applies to all kinds of matters, and having wires strung across the back 40 doesn't always have a lot of appeal for most people.

Well, one day a full page ad appeared in the newspaper paid for by these opponents. The ad included a quote from a friend of mine who was the PR spokesperson for the power company. The ad declared how evil he personally and the power company were for placing deadly power lines across the land. The ad informed readers that 60 children and infants had purportedly died from the low-frequency magnetic fields that were generated when strung across a reservation in Canada.

60 children died? This is quite an indictment. Was it true? Are power lines this unsafe? (The answer is no, though it will kill you if you illegally trespass, climb a tower and touch the wires.)

That story came to mind when I read Kaitlyn Tiffany's article in the May issue of The Atlantic, Something's in the Air. The article is about conspiracy theories related to technology in general, and with regards to 5G specifically. 

She opens with by noting that cancer caused by power lines was a major conviction of many people back in the 70s. Televisions and microwave ovens were believed to be human health risks. More recently, the notion of having cell phones next to our brains was leading to brain damage. (That is why I always put you on speaker phone. JK)

In short, Tiffany begins her article by citing the manner in which our paranoia can be fed when we do not understand technologies. 

I once wrote an article about how we are constantly bombarded with radio waves and sound waves and other kinds of wavs, that if we could see it all, we'd see that we are sitting in a solid mass of waves. What looks like empty space is not empty at all.

The article's intro is designed to remind us that in the light of history (and I am surprised the Luddites didn't get noted at this point) the current resistance to 5G shouldn't surprise us. What is surprising, however, is its vehemence. She writes:

A wildly disorienting pandemic coming at the same time as the global rollout of 5G—the newest technology standard for wireless networks—has only made matters worse. “5G launched in CHINA. Nov 1, 2019. People dropped dead,” the singer Keri Hilson wrote in a now-deleted tweet to her 4.2 million followers in March. As the coronavirus spread throughout Europe, fears about 5G appear to have animated a rash of vandalism and arson of mobile infrastructure, including more than 30 incidents in the U.K. in just the first 10 days of April. In the case of one arson attack in the Netherlands, the words “Fuck 5G” were reportedly found scrawled at the scene.

The article is well researched and quotes people from different points of view. David Savitz, an epidemiologist, notes how cell phones went from nowhere to everywhere in about a decade. Simultaneously, wifi and cell towers became ubiquitous.  "Now nearly every public urban place has Wi-Fi," he said, "and we will soon have small cell towers every few blocks. Whether or not you believe this will give you brain cancer, you didn’t have a chance to opt out."

Further on in the article Tiffany writes about businesses that have emerged to protect us from the adverse effects of all this technology, both products and services. Would you like your new home inspected to make sure it's not killing you? For $150 an hour, this can be done. If you know who to call. (A 21st century version of Ghostbusters, I suppose.)

Everything above is only scratching the surface as to why the 5G rollout has encountered resistance. There's that whole other aspect of a techno-culture with wraparound surveillance. They can be watching and listening to us everywhere we go. They track us by our cell phones. Why not all the other sensors in our Internet-of-Things world?

BOTTOM LINE: It's an informative deep dive into a complex issue. Wherever you stand on this issue, I believe Kaitlyn Tiffany brings a fair and thorough overview of what's happening in our age of disruptions.

Here's the link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/great-5g-conspiracy/611317/

Kevin Spacey's House of Cards

Until last week, though I'd heard several people talk about the TV series House of Cards, I myself hadn't ever seen it. Which led me to take out the DVD set for the first season, which I began watching last Tuesday evening. My initial impression was of a tightly written, well-scripted show featuring a major star and a unique device: the lead character's manner of turning to the audience and "letting us in" on what he's thinking or doing, bringing us along on his Inside-the-Beltway power plays.

Now that I've seen six or seven episodes, I feel ready to offer a few observations.

It seems ironic that after watching the first two shows I picked up the March Atlantic magazine and discovered a somewhat scathing review of the show and other shows in an article titled Why the British Are Better at Satire. It begins...

If there was ever an era ripe for political satire in America, the current one displays all the symptoms: rampant dysfunction in Congress; a paralyzed, peevish administration; dynastic ambitions in not one but two families; a surfeit of outsize and frequently cartoonish figures jockeying for space on the national stage. Given the wealth of material so near at hand, I was eagerly anticipating David Fincher’s adaptation of the brilliant 1990 BBC miniseries House of Cards when it debuted on Netflix two years ago. At last we would see biting, eminently British political satire applied to an American milieu.

With Season Three about to begin, it’s safe to say that this hasn’t happened. The U.S. version of House of Cards is sleek and often intriguing, but by now it has made clear that its specialty is melodrama, not satire.

Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

Melodrama: a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions.

In the former, the appeal is to one's wits. The latter strives for an emotional kick.

The very next day after reading The Atlantic piece the local paper featured a story on the show in its A&E section. This piece struck me as more of a puff piece rather than an indictment of the show's shortcomings. House of Cards is getting ready for its third season and the publicity machinery is in play.

On the positive side of the ledger, Kevin Spacey seems to have been born for this role. In some ways he doesn't seem to have changed much since his role as a hard boiled reporter in the Disney film Iron Will which was filmed here in Duluth in 1993. It was his Oscar-winning performance in The Usual Suspects that put him on the map. Other roles in the 90's included the suburban dad in mid-life crisis in American Beauty which resulted in another Oscar, and the cynical publicity hound cop Jack Vincennes in L.A. Confidential. And now he's Frank Underwood, master manipulator in the Machiavellian world of Washington.

The show has a 9.1 rating on imdb.com, so it clearly knows how to connect with audiences. People like seeing things they themselves have never experienced, hence they used to watch shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous" and now reality shows about cops on the beat. So now, they get yet another show about life inside the Beltway, on Capitol Hill.

Until I read The Atlantic piece I hadn't realized that Frank Underwood's manner of turning toward the audience to bring them along was not original. But then, Shakespeare had done this centuries ago, too. It's called an "aside." Maybe it struck me as original because I don't recall ever having seen it on TV.

Something else that struck me is how loose the standards have become with regard to sexual explicitness. A half century ago Lenny Bruce was brought up on obscenity charges for a monologue titled "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb." He became a target by not backing down from the edge, by demonstrating the inconsistency and absurdity of then current obscenity laws. Today we have everything placed right out there and in your face.

In Episode 7 (I believe) we find Frank Underwood in a tryst with the young reporter whom he has groomed to be his media mouthpiece. She calls her father to wish him an early father's day blessing as Underwood proceeds to undress her and perform cunnilingus on her. She tells her father she'll "try to come," making other similar statements with double meanings. It's a direct ripoff of a Firesign Theater sketch from the early 1970's. Except in that case it was funny. This isn't funny. And worse, it starts to feel cliche.

The awards this show is receiving ensure that its audience will grow still wider. As for me, it's already starting to make me feel tired. Spacey makes the consummate anti-hero at a time when we could use real heroes. Then again, maybe this is the reality we live in. Politics is a dirty game and we shouldn't pin our hopes on it.  

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The current July/August edition of The Atlantic has an eye-riveting cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid? The sub-head of this feature by Nicholas Carr is, WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS.

Carr insists he is not a Luddite, no doubt for fear that if he gets labelled "anti-progress" his thesis will not be taken seriously. He claims that computers in general, and the Internet more specifically, and Google most deliberately, are changing the way we think in ways that should alarm us.

The positive side of Google is self-evident. Information that once might have taken days for a college paper may often be located in minutes, or faster. There are tremendous efficiencies here with regard to information.

But Carr proposes that what's going on has insidious side effects with regard to our human-ness in the same way the Industrial Age crushed people through its commitment to "maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output." Google's mission, he says, is to make our brains more efficient.

According to Google's chief exec Eric Schmidt, the company is founded on the idea of total measurement and systematization. The mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Who can argue with that? We all know about useless data and useless information.

Carr points out that this kind of efficiency creates new absolutes that do not leave room for "the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed."

In some ways this is not a new phenomenon. Edwin Aldrin, in his walk on the moon with Neil Armstrong in 1969, had fifteen seconds for "being human." The rest of his four hour stint was an effort to efficiently set up and execute eight hours of experiments. Some would say, "Hey, you got the privilege to have someone else pay for the ride that gave you a dream experience." But it could also be argued that this scientific approach to everything does something unkind to the soul.

Maybe that's Carr's concern. I don't really know how much weight to give it, but I sort of hear where he's coming from.

The author appears fair in his assessments. That is, he notes how Socrates objected to writing because people would rely on the written word and not use their brains to remember things. Yet the written word has opened worlds for us. And Gutenberg likewise had critics, but the availability of books has likewise created manifold blessings.

My take here is that we need to assume some personal responsibility in this matter. I myself do art, putz about the yard trimming a few branches, listen to music and in this manner bring balance to that "other side." And a daily time of reflection, journal writing, re-centering is for me something akin to the "breathe in, breathe out" rhythm of life. The goal of life is not to become a brain, but to become fully human, which includes mind, will, emotions... and soul.