The overwhelming failure of the Democratic Party since 2000 is allowing the Bush Administration to present itself as representative of mainstream American values. It is not a core value of our country to invade other countries on false pretenses, then to occupy them for years afterwards; or to invalidate and throw away the voting rights of millions because of mysterious technological problems; or to detain people indefinitely without due process. The Democrats have generally tried to oppose Bush with specific ideas about various policies. It might be more effective to focus on vision and values -- to call for a return to the principles of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law before attempting to address specific problems. Things are so far out of whack, and our system of government is under attack from so many different angles, that we need to identify and articulate the larger concerns before tackling the smaller ones.
Every day on “Air America” radio you can hear a litany of the sins of the current Administration. You can read about them online and in parts of the mainstream media, but until now no major politician has stepped forward to indict the Bush-Cheney leadership from top to bottom. Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, reads like the police blotter he alleges for the high crimes and misdemeanors of those in power since 2001. If you want a lesson in -- or a reminder of -- what has gone wrong in the past half dozen years, this book provides that, but it attempts to go deeper. Gore, as everyone knows, is partial to science and he delves into how broadcast journalism (television primarily) and the workings of the human brain have made us far more susceptible to dangerous propaganda. The more we’re controlled emotionally by fear-based images and speeches, the more our capacity to reason comes under assault. The more unconsciously we react to the surface of events, the less likely we are to look beneath them for complexity or hidden agendas. If Bush and Cheney state and then constantly re-state that they stand for bedrock American virtues, it must be so. As I turned the pages of Gore’s book, I found myself asking more and more questions. The fundamental one (which the author also poses) is why has this avalanche of negative information about the administration produced so little collective public outrage and almost no oversight on the part of Congress?
The answers are murky. As someone who’s written books about prominent criminal matters, like the O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases, I have hands-on experience dealing with some of these issues. There’s more to the problem than the science of the human brain or Gore’s assertion that people with more money have more access to TV time. The Simpson case, more than any other recent event, changed the American media landscape. It arrived as cable TV was taking root and set up a new class of hugely popular commentators -- starting with Geraldo Rivera and then followed by Bill O’Reilly and others -- who acted as if they did not believe they could be wrong about legal cases or other social events. They didn’t have an intellectual bone in their bodies (or minds), and by that I mean they weren’t interested in an objective search for the truth. What contradicted their opinions was dismissed out of hand as the work of “conspiracy theorists” or “nut cases.” If they’d been right in example after example, that would be one thing. But when their projections were shown to be off the mark, they weren’t censored or demoted or fired, but handed even more power and influence.
It’s impossible to measure the affect of all this on the American public. We’ve been “dumbed down” because those telling us what to think have no apparent capacity to consider realities more entangled than they can imagine. Every large event of the past 15 years has been filtered through this lens, and trying to halt the process or even slow it down is incredibly difficult. Once false assumptions are in place, and have then been reiterated thousands of times, they are virtually unchangeable. Because Al Gore has been so prominent for so many years, I don’t think he understands how easily alternative voices are stifled or kept out of mainstream media discussions. It is terribly ironic that when we have more and better technology than ever, and more and more cable TV outlets, the conversation about most topics remains severely limited: in 2002, there were, for example, almost no voices opposing the war in Iraq, when it might have made a difference. Generally speaking, TV operates within a tiny range of the possibilities that might be addressed, and everything else is ignored or marginalized. Put another way, any society that allows people like Geraldo Rivera to become its primary interpreter of important events is setting itself up for trouble, and that’s exactly what American got.
Gore is accurate in seeing all this as part of an attack not just on reason but on our experiment in democracy. People cannot make good policy decisions if they’re being fed information that’s either deliberately misleading or has never been properly scrutinized. Well-intentioned folks can be dead wrong in their passionately held opinions, which is why we have due process and why our second president, John Adams, insisted more than 200 years ago that ours is a government of laws and not men. It’s alarming how far down this road of unexamined assumptions we have gone. In the past decade or so, I’ve watched many hours of heated argument on TV about events that I believe never happened. If you saw an individual or two engaged in this kind of activity, what would you call them? When you see the elite of an entire society doing it, what are we supposed to think? We haven’t experienced merely an assault on reason, but a complete nervous breakdown that hasn’t yet been fully recognized or diagnosed. If I were a Democrat running for president in 2008, I wouldn’t worry much about what any of the other candidates are doing or saying. I’d run on a return to the original principles of our country and the wisdom of its founders. Maybe that’s what Gore is getting ready to do.