CSotD: Fiddling with the lights while Rome burns
Skip to comments
Mike Thompson takes on the latest idiot distraction, the alleged banning of incandescent light bulbs.
There's nothing new about populist demagogues pandering to the mob with distorted fears of things in their daily lives while more sweeping issues go unremarked. But Thompson does well to riff off the fact that there has never been a time when government intrusion was more egregious in the United States than it is now, and yet people are ignoring the larger attacks on individual freedom in favor of focusing on a minor issue so laden with mythology, misinterpretations and downright lies that Politifact awarded two "Pants on Fire" grades to statements being made, while rating the rest "Half True" and "Barely True."
I should note that the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s were certainly significant attacks on freedom, but the current "security" issues come at a time when the ability to intrude is far more well-developed.
And, even in the context of this greater intrusion, people get more upset over TSA making sure nobody hides anything in a diaper than the government going silent after sending an innocent man off to be tortured overseas. (I previously commented on babies and smuggling on my personal blog.)
Aside from the growth of Big Brother (an issue frightening enough that it should never be fully put aside), there is this fascinating and very-much-related matter of demogogues managing to use minutiae to distract the populace.
Start with talk radio and those anonymous "talk back" columns in newspapers, where, even before the advent of the Internet, toxic, paranoid, misanthropic cranks were encouraged to phone in and have their opinions publicized. I do not speak theory on this, having not only worked for several papers with "talk back" columns but having also put in my time conversing with the delusional over the airwaves.
I can't tell you how many times I'd run into sane, rational friends later who would say, "Boy, you really had some winners this morning." And I'd respond, "Why didn't you call in?" only to have them back away in horror at the idea.
Today, this phenomenon has been ramped up geometrically by the "comments" on the Internet, in which people are encouraged to voice their opinions in a cacaphony that is like shouting into a hurricane. When an article on HuffPost gets 2,000 comments, what do any of them mean? People argue back and forth, exchanging insults, lies and nonsense, making no impression except one of anger and discontent.
The result is a threat to democracy, in which the loudest and most distracting voices appear to speak for a much larger group than they truly represent, simply because the sane majority keeps silent, either ignoring them completely or declining to join in, but, for whatever reason, giving the sense that "everybody" has these strong, violent, ill-advised and uninformed opinions.
This is hardly new; One of my favorite quotations is from Edmund Burke who observed the phenomenon two centuries ago: "Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the fields ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."
And yet we can see how the grasshoppers have succeeded in bringing the negotiations over the economy to a screeching (chinking?) halt, with the GOP convinced that, if they don't satisfy the grasshoppers, they will be trampled as if by cattle and Obama apparently afraid of the insects as well, though he now claims to be willing to stand up to them.
Grasshoppers simply have too much power in this country.
In the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, US attempts to join the rest of the world in converting to metric measure was brought to a halt by the howls of booboisie outrage, stoked in part by columnist Bob Greene's "We Ain't Metric" movement — which started as a joke and morphed into an ego trip of Beckian proportions — and foolish rumors like the one declaring that, if we made the conversion, the NFL would be required to use meters instead of yards.
Similarly, the move to protect women against discrimination with a constitutional amendment was blocked in large part by fear that it would require unisex bathrooms.
And, just last week, NPR reported on the waste caused by the Mint's enforced production of dollar coins which sit in vaults because Congress doesn't have the cojones to risk upsetting the grasshoppers by halting the printing of paper dollars.
Perhaps the long winters in Canada are not as hospitable to grasshoppers, but, in any case, they don't seem to take them as seriously as we do down here. When it was time to convert to metric, they converted to metric. And when they realized that it was wasteful to keep printing dollar bills that wore out so quickly, they stopped printing them and went to the dollar coin, which was quickly dubbed the "Looney" because of the bird engraved upon it, but which went into use without a great deal of whining and heel-dragging.
Not that Canada doesn't have its fair share of the other sort of loonies, mind you. But they apparently recognize that, if it walks like a loon and cries like a loon, well …
Comments 11
Comments are closed.