Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
-HAL, the onboard computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
To rephrase Wordsworth slightly, the news is too much with us, and listening
and watching we lay waste our powers.
Click your way through the channels in the sleepless hours of the early
morning, and soon they all begin to merge into one meaningless blur of
voices and visions until, with one final click, the sound and fury
signifying nothing ceases.
Ah, respite.
Sane silence.
We are no longer part of Marshall McLuhan's global village, that is, the
worldwide mob.
"The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been a mark
of high civilization both on the part of individuals and communities."
-Isaiah Berlin.
The dark night of the soul, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, that sage of
the Jazz Age, always comes at 3 o'clock in the morning. In our time,
television makes the dark hour even darker - in the brightest way. Just as
the Internet, that marvel of our over-informed age, provides us with an
infinite wealth of information and an absolute dearth of judgment.
The news seduces us into thinking it is new, when often enough it is but a
remake. The roles may be played by different actors, but the plot lines
scarcely vary. It's as if Ecclesiastes were the news anchor: "The thing that
hath been, it is that which shall beŠ." Until you feel you're caught in a
house of mirrors forever replaying the past and calling it BREAKING NEWS.
Free speech is as free as ever at Columbia University, where a mob shouted
down a presentation by the Minutemen, who propose to stop illegal
immigration by patrolling the Mexican border. Or by building a wall - as if
there were no such things as ladders, tunnels, wire cutters, rust and decay.
Or maybe by deporting 13 million people, and that estimate may be on the low
side. (That great sucking sound you'd hear would be the American economy
crashing.)
The best response to bad ideas is better ones. Instead, "Shut up," the mob
explains. So much for the notion that a university ought to be a place of
free inquiry. That idea was pretty much done in by the Spirit of the
Sixties, when the ultimate arbiter of intellectual exchange on campus became
whoever could shout loudest.
The rowdy scene at Columbia U. inspired a certain nostalagia in some of us.
It was like watching the rebirth of a plague, or the return of 40-year
locusts right on schedule. It restores one's faith in natural cycles, or at
least history's pendulum. Things may not make sense, but at least they make
patterns.
Sometimes you can actually see the reel of time unwind. The hands on the
clock twirl counter-clockwise. The prices on the gas pump go backward. Who's
directing this movie, Salvador Dali?
Fair is fair: Just as there were congressional hearings when gas prices
soared and Big Oil was accused of manipulating the market, shouldn't there
now be outraged voices demanding to know why gas prices have dropped?
Shouldn't Congress be investigating this dangerous conspiracy?
Remember when the junior senator and ace investigator from Arkansas, Mark
Pryor, got the head of the Federal Trade Commission before the Senate
Commerce Committee and, along with some of his more suspicious colleagues,
started browbeating her?
Back then Sen. Pryor was demanding that the FTC produce proof of some dark
and sinister plot to raise gas prices. The lady - Deborah Platt Majoras -
quietly and patiently stood her ground, trying to explain the law of supply
and demand. But of course Mark Pryor and his suspicious colleagues weren't
interested in the actual data; they had angry constituents to appease and an
issue to demagogue.
Now those danged oil companies are clearly involved in another nefarious
conspiracy, this time to lower consumer prices. But somehow I don't think
there's going to be another investigation.
It's another World Series without the Damn Yankees. The world seems off its
axis. I begin to have the strangest sensation. It's surreal, dizzying,
entirely new. Maybe I should call a doctor. I begin to feel Š a certain
sympathy for New York Yankee fans. Dave, my mind is going. I can
feel it.