Disunifying Theory

As is often the case, there’s an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Grossthat I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Actually two episodes, but I think of them as one. I’ll explain.

Terry Gross could interview a
doorknob, and I’d still listen.

Among the many reasons that I find Fresh Air consistently fascinating are the regular segments contributed by Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who formerly taught at Stanford University and now is on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley (I am now far enough removed from my boyhood in Palo Alto to forgive him for his defection from Stanford to arch-rival Berkeley; the fact that he has nothing to do with sports may have helped). I am partial to most anything related to language, as I’ve indicated elsewhere. Further exciting my interest is the way that Nunberg investigates the vernacular of today’s popular media. The June 29th episode of Fresh Air contained a short Nunberg commentary on the extreme pronouncements of conservative pundits and the effect they have had on what now passes for political discourse. On the July 6th program he was given a full interview wherein he expounded further upon the same subject, which apparently forms the core of his new book Talking Right (which carries the lengthy but colorful subtitle, How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show).

Geoff Nunberg, looking
very book jacket-y

Hearing Mr. Nunberg’s thesis touched off a bit of a mental conflagration, my mind cycling through observations collected over recent months and years, tracking new associations between seemingly disparate elements. There’s a whole lot of shit to think about here, and I’ll be doing so for a long time yet. My sense of things is that Nunberg’s observations serve to underscore a fundamental characteristic of our society at the present moment: the sheer volume of information that pervades our lives in this Information Age does not draw us together as an informed community – it isolates us from one another.

There are as many messages available on a given subject as there are channels on a satellite TV service, or movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes, or Wordpress blogs (…holy shit, I’m part of the problem!). Having this many options is a marvelous thing, with the only catch being that it necessitates critical thinking. Critical thinking is hard. When you’re pleasantly flopped onto the sofa with a beverage after a long day at work, and your remote comes to rest on Ann Coulter in time to hear her say that liberals believe in Darwinian evolution because they see at as carte blanche to kill, maim and oppress under the guise of “survival of the fittest,” critical thinking is downright inconvenient. It’s easy to see why the average viewer would be more likely to just keep watching and listening, rather than risk missing whatever bold condemnation she might utter next in order to ask him or herself, “What evidence could Ann Coulter provide to support such a claim? Has she, like, interviewed scores of left-wing criminals who all cited Darwin as a moral get-out-of-jail-free card?”

Many have remarked upon the major media outlets’ shift into presenting news material as entertainment. Since politics has always been a major subset of news reporting, I suppose it is not surprising that its treatment in the news media is now less about journalism than it is about show business. It’s political discourse in which the intended response is not more discursing, but plain old cursing. It may counterproductive to the course of our nation, but hey – the Nielsen ratings are terrific.