As I recall it was Henry David Thoreau who protested the reading of newspapers not only because of their sensationalism, but because when it comes to actually understanding events, the exercise is ultimately futile. A deep appreciation of any news story - its past causes, its present configurations, its future ramifications - would require endless study. To fully explore just one newspaper report - to see its political, economic, historical, religious and cultural entwinements - would demand such vast effort one couldn’t get past the front page without a lifetime of research and contemplation.
What Thoreau was describing was the paralysis of intellect - a helpful affliction among academics, but no others. Just try reading any newspaper with your curiosity wholly unleashed and you’ll find Thoreau was right. You’ll find you can’t progress past the front page, past one story, perhaps even past the first paragraph.
Take as an example this opening to a recent New York Times piece:
President Bush defended his policy in Iraq today, a crucial moment for that emerging country, telling a gathering of veterans in Utah that the struggle to build a new nation amounts to “the first war of the 21st century.”
One could spend decades pondering the inherent depths of that sentence’s first two words alone, never mind what follows. Which is to say, how in God’s name did such a schmuck become president of the United States? How was it that so many in a literate nation could willingly pull a lever in support of a blithering idiot? Indeed, bluntly but accurately asked Britain’s Daily Mirror on post-election day, “How can 59,017,382 million people be so dumb?”
You got me - and anyone else who has attempted an answer. We’re still befuddled and likely to remain so. Five years of national psychoanalysis and reams of op-ed guesses and stacks of political science manuscripts haven’t helped one bit in closing the book on how 59 million people can be that dumb.
It wasn’t as though Bush was an unknown factor in 2004, which at least explains why he received some votes in the first go-around. No, this time around, for 48 long, agonizing months he demonstrated in full view and on a daily basis that he was a world-class idiot. Then tens of millions marched right out and voted for him.
This isn’t meant to disparage Mr. Bush. He can’t help that he’s an idiot, and if I were a wealthy idiot with his connections I would want to be Top Idiot, too. But it does disparage democracy, thereby urging a review of two-thousand years of politico-philosophical wisdom, just for starters.
It’s tempting to say that Bush used every dirty trick and every propagandistic tool there is to pry his way into office both times and leave it at that. But that doesn’t really explain anything, because there’s still the matter of those 59,017,382 million people so benighted and easily hoodwinked that they could swallow a world-class idiot’s naked manipulations to begin with. How did they get that way? That’s the deeper question.
So off you go analyzing it from every angle - the political, the economic, the historical, the religious and the cultural - and you’re eventually overwhelmed. What causes people to support a party that consistently acts in opposition to its stated principles? Why do millions vote against their economic self-interest? What role should religion play in casting a secular vote? And the cultural? That alone is a nightmarish, anthropological quagmire of the loosey-goosey, the concrete, the possibly meaningless and the definitely profound.
Honestly pursued, any one of these investigative avenues would consume your life in study, at the end of which you’d still be fundamentally stumped.
“President Bush” - a two-word phrase that leaves one’s intellect paralyzed with wonder. And we never even got to the other incomprehensibles, such as Mr. Two-Word Phrase’s defense of “his policy in Iraq,” as though what he has is a policy, and what he’s doing could be defended.
While the unhappily curious Left sits and ponders how it all came to be, the happily oblivious Right sits and plots where it’s all going. Is this reason enough to drop introspection and opt for pure, Nietzschean action? I dunno know. I’d have to think about it.
[note: I just got my art page back up, which you can see here. New works will appear soon and I apologize for the page's present incompleteness.]
