At what cost do we listen and watch, rather than read?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Feb. 20, 2025 – Ten weeks before his death, FDR posed for the photograph that amounts to a Postcard from the Edge of Night. With capitalism seated on his right and communism on his left, we see him force a grin for posterity.
The author of America’s New Deal is the central figure in the photo because his mastery of the left and right wings of America’s democratic-republic, both solved the Great Depression, and made the United States the world’s umpire, just as any rationale for empire would die in the mutual suicide pact of the two world wars.
America was born as a place of refuge from nations and empires that used religion to enforce political conformity to whichever church the regime preferred, as well as from countries where rulers didn’t bother to glove their iron fists.
Roosevelt was the avatar of ecumenism, which wouldn’t become a thing until the second Vatican council, convened in 1958 by a pope eager to reform a church whose people supported the original axis of evil: Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Vichy France.
Perhaps it is true that personal obedience to authority, as Catholic dogma demands, is an irrelevant coincidence to how readily Spanish, Italian, German, and French Catholics became storm troopers, engineers, and accountants in the facilitation of a holocaust of Biblical proportions.
So, too, it may be true that, in 2025, the American presidency is in good hands, and the people of the United States are good stewards of the universal, eternal dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Roosevelt made capital and labor work together toward common goals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; his vision and steadfastness made real the promise etched into the foundation of the Statue of Liberty, the gift of a people proud of the role they played to help Americans do what they never could do for themselves – break free of the unwelcome influence of British, German, Russian and every other alien power.
It is a testament to the power of ecumenism, of common cause, that a Protestant man came to embody American ideals as expressed in The New Colossus, the poem by a Jewish woman etched onto a sculpture commissioned by the citizens of a predominantly Roman Catholic nation.
Two objectives are accomplished by calling the photograph Postcard from the Edge of Night:
the caption evokes the soporific of TV (where The Edge of Night ran for nearly 30 years),
while it begs the question, which edge of night, the one that leads into the dream and nightmare realm of sleep, or out of sleep and into the daylight of reason and reality?
the value of media depends on who programs it
Radio was the principle weapon Roosevelt and Churchill used to wage the home-front battles that united their constituencies, just as Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler used it to assemble their mad, bloodthirsty mobs. Stalin and Hirohito used blunt force and regarded their peoples as so much cannon fodder, as did Mao.
Now that radio has yielded to TV and the Internet, how have succeeding generations of leaders deployed mass communications to advance their constituents lives, liberty, and pursuits of happiness? They’ve used it the way George Orwell predicted they would in his 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Into the vast wasteland built into the post-war American household leapt innocent, hopeful hearts and minds. Out of it came no longer innocent, no longer hopeful people, but people programmed by an unholy assortment of the corporations, people, and organizations able to program it.
The transition from a people who read into their hearts and minds the news and information necessary to their lives, to a people content with what vast processions of talking heads promised them was true, has stood reason on its head. At least a majority of voters seem to possess neither the ability nor the desire to distinguish between the dictates of TV reality, and the myriad truths of human nature.