People all across this country can’t parse sentences or write them and those who "can" partake of literacy seem to deliberately avoid the obligation to do so. Everyone is allowed to think in fragments.
When I was younger I read Neil Postman’s book entitled "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and thought that the book’s central assertion that Americans have been badly damaged by their collective abandonment of reading was too extreme. Ah but my cautionary and altogether youthful idealism was too much the stuff of the greenhorn. After two George W. Bush administrations, after the feckless reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by the newYork Times, after the wholesale destruction of our nation’s Bill of Rights—I can only conclude that we are fit to sit tightly in the dark and utter low gibberish.
What, you may ask keeps me above the water line of sanity? I have this unshakeable optimism that the people of my nation want better lives for their children and grandchildren. I take comfort from the knowledge that the two finalists for the Democratic presidential nomination are a black man and a woman; I am uplifted to see a blind man (who also happens to be African-American) serving as the governor of New York. I see progress in many sectors. I do.
Still, if the news industry is going to talk endlessly about Jeremiah Wright then I want them to talk just as openly and with the same degree of umbrage about the homophobia and zenophobic ideas of the Rev. Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson—both of whom have vulgar and un-American ideas of several kinds. The press has for far too long given ugly preachers a "pass" when they’re on the Republican side of the ticket.
How do preachers with ugly ideas or politicians who use fear and demagoguery to capture votes get away with it? Because the press won’t make a bi-partisan stab at the matter. If we want to stand for values we have to live them. Amusing ourselves indeed.
S.K.
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