Reading teaches reason the way watching teaches following
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Dec. 18, 2024 – Wobbly rests the hat of authority on the typical American’s head, ever since the introduction, into the American household and family, of the merchant, which happened with the adoption of commercial radio in the aftermath of WWl.
That was the unraveling of the fabric of life in America. It undid the means by which Americans “consume” the information they need to accomplish the tasks of daily life, at the same time as it introduced an honesty-adjacent voice into the family. “We’ll return after this important message from our sponsors.”
As Donald of Yonkers learned from Adolf of Austria, say whatever you want to say loudly and often enough, and the people will follow you all the way to hell.
No people ever read themselves so deep into the dark of imaginary reality as they’ve been led by radio-TV-TikTok. No Irish peasant’s baby was imperiled 300 years ago by Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal for solving the King’s problems with his Irish colony, nor are any rabbits killed when people follow Lewis Carroll down a rabbit hole, as they have for 150 years.
But with passive commercial electronic media replacing the reason-fueled act of reading, no longer will childhood be the years when father knows best. Instead, Father Knows Best becomes a radio program, then a first generation TV sit-com and model for the new leviathan that drowns the faculty of reason in a flood of audio-visual sensation.
The vanguard of the generation I was born into, before TV had achieved supreme authority, put up a struggle against commercialization, just as we struggled to complete the undoing of Jim Crow begun by our elders during the 1950s, with the dismantling of segregation in schools, and throughout the housing, hospitality, and public transportation industries.
Our respect for the power of language rallied us around Mario Savio as we demonstrated for the right to speak truth to the omnipotent education bureaucracy; we rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for jobs and the freedom of dignity, and we refused to swallow the Pentagon’s poison pill, which would’ve made us believe that Vietnam, an impoverished post-colonial nation, posed a clear and present danger to the most secure nation in the history of the world!
Plenty of first wave baby boomers were able to discern signal from noise, if only because they hadn’t been weaned on TV, but on radio, records, and books. My own luck is due to the fact that my father held out against TV in our home until I was six.
When pop culture really popped
Our loosely-affiliated tribe knew that money doesn’t talk it swears, in the words of big brother Bob Dylan, while British cousin Mick was knighted for pointing a finger at radio and TV ads, for decrying the man who tells him how white his shirts could be, but he can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke Mick’s brand of cigarette. (I Can’t Get No Satisfaction)
The second* most overlooked speech of the last 100 years is Newton Minnow’s “Vast wasteland speech” of 1961, his first as chairman of the F.C.C., which he delivered to the National Association of Broadcasters.
We interrupt this narrative to point out that the F.C.C. was established to give cover to broadcasters, who wanted to silence the venomous Father Coughlin, but without alienating anybody in the nation’s largest radio audience. The N.A.B. severed the hateful priest’s microphone, but then encouraged FDR to establish the F.C.C., to inoculate themselves from ever having to act like responsible citizens again.
Broadcasters across the media spectrum today support candidates who promise to deny such agencies as the F.C.C. both the means to investigate and the power the regulate how channels of public communication may be used.
As is obvious today, public communications operate in a perennial wild west where alien sheriffs such as Murdoch, Musk, and TikTok are hired by the rich mine owners and ranchers that people gather around, desperate for jobs, since their eviction by Elites back East.
Having passed the three-quarter pole in the one hundred year dash of my life, all that is left for me to do is to cast off, or at least identify, as much of the crap that has piled up since those halcyon days of the Truman Administration.
Yes, Halcyon days are an appropriate reference for the man who made war obsolete** by dropping two atomic bombs, because the present generation of Americans has handed over the hat of authority FOR A SECOND TIME, to a creature created by TV, who neither reads nor writes, but who steals, cheats, and lies.
* Ike’s Farewell Address; so unheeded that the academic-industrial-complex is a stronger and more onerous force than any old world tyrant would even dream of.
** To pursue political ends with inferior weapons is not war, but a step backwards toward savagery. Mutually Assured Destruction is multilateral terrorism.