Grass Valley Report

The puzzling question these days seems to be how can we accurately critique incompetence? When John Dean broke stride with Nixon during Watergate, he was seen as ‘the Judas’ of Nixon’s cabinet. Generations later, a tyranny of silence passively condones the banishment of whistle blowers making them examples of what happens when you “rock the boat.” People in power have been demonizing dissent for a long time but they’ve never been able to count on the consensus making ability that contemporary media can create. We see the winner of a political campaign as the one who can afford the most TV spots, not necessarily the one who carried the day with a just cause.

With so many people vicarious about their expressions of courage, it’s hard to make an appeal to common sense. Our insights have become so muddled by media that we are almost certain not to trust ourselves. In an article on global warming versus terrorism, George Monboit writes in The Guardian:

"Why are we transfixed by terrorism, yet relaxed about the collapse of the conditions that make our lives possible? One reason is surely the disjunction between our expectations and our observations (the suspension of disbelief).

And this leads us, I think, to a further reason for turning our eyes away. When terrorists threaten us, it shows that we must count for something, that we are important enough to kill. They confirm the grand narrative of our lives, in which we strive through thickets of good and evil towards an ultimate purpose. But there is no glory in the threat of climate change."

The battle between good and evil is only a box office away. With fixed fights like “Rocky”, “Million Dollar Baby”, and “Mission Impossible” that engage our adrenals as if we are about to take it on the chin ourselves, we turn over power to those who eventually make us pay for our suspension of disbelief. If we substitute ‘naively accept’ for suspension of disbelief we might wonder why we don’t wonder more. Such manufactured certainties are not strange to us. We have come to personally think in sound bytes, addictively acting out the cues media arbitrators use to occupy our instincts of fight/flight. We continue to believe that entertainment will somehow provide an escape from the gnawing feeling that we are, in fact, more hollow from the deathless pyrotechnics (special effects) that create these disjunctions between our expectations and our observations. If we don’t see the coffins returning from Iraq, the dead soldiers are only numbers.

Governance itself has become a voyueresque event. “Don’t worry,” we’re told, “We’ll have a committee do an investigation on that matter.” And what will they do with the findings? In other times there would be public outrage and heads would roll. Often morality’s failing is it’s inaccessibility to the patently obvious. Enter talk news and anyone can be an expert. When Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” I don’t think he had Fox News or Hollywood in mind.