A Momentary Taste of Being

I guess this poll played out?

I've always found network news confusing, terrifying, deeply depressing, and deeply disengaging.  My father and teachers frequently insisted that I imbibe from this foul stream on a daily basis.  As soon as I came to an age where I could make my own determinations I fled from it as far as I could go.  And Postman actually pinpoints why all these things should be our natural reactions to the production. from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman All television news programs being, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music. I have found very few Americans who regard this custom as peculiar. . . What has music to do with the news? Why is it there? It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in the theater and films--to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment. If there were no music--as is the case when any television program is interrupted for a new flash--viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly life-alter...

The last excerpts last night may have gotten a little ahead of where I wanted to be as I chronicle notes for this book.  So I'm going to take a couple of steps back and record some observations, one of which I'm still evaluating, but which I find persuasive. from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman It may be true, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, that the spirit that fired the American mind was the fact of an ever-expanding frontier. But it is also true, as Paul Anderson has written, the "it is no mere figure of speech to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau." For it was not only a frontier mentality that led Kansas to be the first state to permit women to vote in school elections, or Wyoming the first state to grant complete equality in the franchise. Women were probably more adept readers than men, and even in the frontier states the principal means of public discourse issued from the printed word....

The fall of American Reason as chronicled: from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman The solution to these problems, [the vast distances and spaces separating American communities from one another in the time of the frontier] as every school child used to know, was electricity. To no one's surprise, it was an American who found a practical way to put electricity in the service of communication and, in doing so, eliminated the problem of space once and for all.  I refer, of course, to Samuel Finley Breese Morse, America's first true "spaceman." His telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified American discourse. But at a considerable cost. For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make "one neighborhood of the whole country." It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave ...

Young Conservatives composing books .  Very young--14 years old.  I could care less about politics, but pursuant to my anecdote about Son and Kafka, young people can be far more perspicacious than we give them credit for.