Talking Points, Talking Heads, Talking Trash
By: Robert Crane
I can pick them out as easily as red onions from a garden salad. I’m speaking about people who repeat talking points dished out to them by ideologue insurgents. All you have to do is listen to callers on C-SPAN for an hour and you will hear them regurgitate every chunk, every morsel, every scrap of garbage fed to them the day before by “news talk radio”.
Remember when we all joined hands to laugh at the “truth” provided by Baghdad Bob as he spoke from the rooftop of the Iraqi Communication Center, while hiding adjacent bombed-out buildings with curtains as he stood defiantly at the edge, arms flailing at some obscure smokeless area, proclaiming victory was near. He became a media phenom in those early patriotic days of the Iraq war. Yup, he kept us perpetually amused with his blind eye and forked tongue.
Yet while we chuckle at folks like Baghdad Bob and his faithful, we clamor into our own lines on a cliff, ready to jump when given the “truth” by Hannity or Franken, Limbaugh or Rhodes, Mehlman or Dean, Fox News or Air America, Frist or Kennedy, ad nausea or et cetera. I do not see the difference between Baghdad Bob and those mentioned, except to say that Baghdad Bob’s life probably depended on the “truths” he spoke. The others do it for money, celebrity, and power.
Regardless of who releases talking points or who pushes them out to the public domain, they are propaganda pure and simple—partial facts, misleading spin, clever word-smithing, out-of-context sound bites—all for the purpose of pandering to some agenda. And we are an eager audience, soaking up the lackey leakage like an extra absorbent Depends pad.
In this day of hundreds of cable channels, thousands of magazines, tens of thousands of blogs, millions of websites, we can search and find the “news” we want to hear and how we want to hear it. The media source cherry picks the information and we cherry pick the media source. It’s easy to do, takes no thought, and forever keeps us polarized as we isolate ourselves in information silos.
Frankly, the days of honest debate, serious discussion, hard problem solving, and above all, listening, thinking and negotiating are sadly numbered. Partisanship and ideology have taken over. It doesn’t matter whether there is a Republican majority or Democrat majority across all branches of the government. Nothing of substance can be moved when our heels are dug in up to our eyeballs.
Sadly, in this era of pundit propagandizing, evil labeling and rhetorical ranting, the disenfranchised numbers grow larger, their anger deeper, our security weaker, the ozone thinner and the tipping point closer, making these times tough for optimists—a party for pessimists. And we can only blame ourselves.
This article was written by humorist Robert Crane. For more the same and other surprises, visit his popular website at: http://www.cranelegs.com