I Want My Gore TV
By Richard Davis (10/13/05)
Just kidding. I’m a few years past the target audience for Current TV, as is its co-founder Al Gore. He was promoting his fledgling network last week at a media conference in New York when he gave a keynote address on the growing “strangeness of our public discourse.” If his speech was any indication, it’s growing mighty strange indeed.
Though yesterday Gore denied he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2008, no one believes him. He’s been commandeering microphones for three years to project himself as a viable alternative to Hillary. Instead, he usually leaves listeners wondering whether he’s become unhinged. As in New York, where he began his speech, “I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger.”
Though he carefully avoids being specific, even coherent, the grave danger of which he speaks, the cause of the strangeness that “now continually haunts our effort to reason together about the choices we much make as a nation,” appears to be none other than nonliberal opinion. He longs for the halcyon days when we all thought alike.
“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was -- at least for a short time -- a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans -- including some journalists -- that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.”
The period after Katrina was filled with anger, disgust, humiliation, racism and hate. That vividness he fawns over was created by phony reports and rumor-mongering by irresponsible journalists and Democrats, including Gore himself. It was a terrible time unless you were a racist or a rabid Bush hater -- which explains why liberals loved it. Gore himself used the disaster to make political hay by grabbing microphones and criticizing the administration.
Let’s get this straight: Thanks to the internet and cable TV, Americans have more opportunities to express their views or encounter differing opinions today than ever before. That’s what is driving liberals crazy. Gore’s beloved clarity was only an illusion of monopoly. He mourns for the days when there were three identical half-hour newscasts each night and 60 Minutes on Sunday. No talk radio, no internet, no cable television (and most of all no Fox).
Now that the marketplace of ideas has become truly heterogeneous, at least for the short time before liberals can get it under control, Gore informs us that it “effectively no longer exists.”
Gore’s speech is a choice example of what passes for liberal thought these days -- equal parts bad history, specious reasoning, arrogance and mindless Bush-bashing. With Gore you also get an uplifting dose of gratuitous pedantry: “Our brains -- like the brains of all vertebrates -- are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision.” Thank you professor.
To get noticed Gore has been trying to out-Dean Howard Dean with the viciousness of his rhetoric. Like a bad twitch, a nasty partisanship seems to overtake him even in mid thought, as if a timer goes off in his brain: Insert a political slur.
Early in the speech he comments on the media’s fixation with single subjects. When O.J. dominated programming he thought it was just a departure from “normal good sense.” But, he says, “now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.” Then he says, “Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice?”
(Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, called Gore’s comments "fictitious rants that border on dangerous." She said, "To accuse Americans of participating in ‘routine torture’ is absurd and reveals that while Al Gore may no longer be a leader in his party, he still embodies the maniacal anger that guides Democrat leaders in Washington today.")
Here’s a typical sentence from his speech: “Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers.” They’re also resisting the temptation to rob the corner bank, but with all that hemorrhaging going on who knows how long they can hold out
Try this doozy: “Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the ‘demonstration’. This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.”
I’m not sure but I think Gore, a child of the 60s, may be trying to take credit for inventing the political demonstration. That was before he invented the internet.
Did you know Dan Rather was “forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House” or that “every day they [White House] unleash squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.” How can someone who professes to be a journalist have such a reckless disregard for the truth? Oh, wait, that kind of answers itself, doesn’t it?
Though he says “America’s democracy is at grave risk,“ he offers no remedy whatsoever. But he does offer hints at what he’s really trying to say.
At one point he bemoans the passing of the Equal Time Provision and the Fairness Doctrine. When they were removed, Gore said, “Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.” In fact, those laws assured that virtually no opinion at all made it to the airwaves, which certainly preserved national clarity.
Later Gore says that “it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest.” When a liberal mentions diversity to you he either wants to take your job or your freedom of speech, usually both.
Gore touts himself shamelessly as a proponent of openness when in fact what he is peddling is censorship. Everything he’s said up to this point -- the grave danger to democracy, the strangeness of discourse, the destruction of the marketplace of ideas -- cries out for action, and so, in true politico fashion, he declares himself against action. Wink, wink.
And that’s why our discourse is so strange. Too many liberal winks. And we let morons too close to microphones.
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