living, thinking and writing
|
|
| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
|
|
Monday, April 19, 2004 Return of myth May issue of Harper has a piece (Buffalo dances, by Lewis Lapham, p. 9) on the receding of American’s scientific thinking and its implication on national politics. The article starts with the recount of Union of Concerned Scientist’s report titled “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking”. The report, signed by 60 of Nation’s most accomplished scientist, condemns the rejection of scientific methods and distortion of scientific findings by current administration, who’s in favor of its conviction that “if the science doesn’t prove what’s been told to prove, then the science has been tampered with by Satan or the Democratic Party.” While admiring the signatories’ the collective alarm, Lapham argues that it is naïve to think “the government’s divorce from reality is a curable disease subject to congressional diagnosis and legislative remedy”. No, the one needs to be cured is not the government, bu the people. It is these scientists, not the Bush administration, who are at odds with the majority of society. In the other word, people are stupid, and they are not capable of scientific thinking anymore, and they are haapy to accept the magic and myth fabricated by the authority. What makes it? Here is the best part of the article: “The postmodern sensibility is a product of the electronic media, which lend themselves more readily to the traffic in dreams and incantation than to the distributions of coherent argument. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the systems of though derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer leans to eliminate the association of cause with effect….Weightless and without consequence, the images drifting across the mirrors of the self appear and disappear in no context other than their own, demanding nothing of the audience except the duty of ritual observance. Because the camera sees but cannot think, it doesn’t matter who sings the undying songs of love, or whether the twenty-four-hour circus parade goes nowhere except around in circus. Nothing necessarily follows from anything else; what is important is the surge and volume of emotion, not its object or its subject, and the accelerated data streams of the virtual future carry the friends of Rush Limbaugh backward into the firelight flickering in the caves of the pagan and prehistoric past. Narrative dissolves into montage and knowledge becomes a matter of instantly recognizing the iconography (Osama’s beard, the Nike swoosh, Ralph Lauren’s polo player, Howard deans’ upraised fist, Howard Dean’s upraised fist); history reverts to myth, and politics collapse into the staging of pageants sometimes accompanied by a fall of brightly colored balloons.” Lanpham continues to interpret the effect of mediated political campaign on audience. He compares the political campaign to reality show like “Survivor and “the Apprentice”, and noted that the winner is who can “survive the stupidity and pitiless indifference of the television cameras. “Of our presidents we make celebrities-a safer from of constitutional divinity than the one embodied in the name of Caesar-and with gifts of adulation and applause the media appoint them to the office of totem pole. To say that Mr. Bush is an incompetent president is like saying that Tom Cruise can’t act or that Britney Spears can’t sing. The observation might be true, but it ignores the point that celebrity is a commodity meant to be sold at the supermarket checkout counter with the cosmetics and the canned soup. What was once a subject has become an object, no longer capable of error of human speech, imparting a sense of stability and calm to a world intelligence refuses to prove what it’s been told to prove. The headlines bring word of death in Iraq and terrorism in Spain, famine in Somalia and banditry in Washington, but on the smooth and reassuring surface of a magazine cover or movie screen, the golden masks of divine celebrity-George W. and Nicole, Julia and the Donald-bestow upon the faithful the smiles o infinite bliss.” The deprivation of thinking from public minds by mass media seems an un-invertible tragedy and it gives rise to the handy manipulation of public minds. Lanpham argues that the loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs is far less serious than the depletion of the national reserves of political intelligence, without which “we join secretary of defense Rumsfled in the magical explanation for the non-existence of hideous weapons in Iraq (“The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” or Attorney General Ashcroft in the belief that in America “there is no King but Jesus”. posted by lmeimei @1:29 PM| permanent link| | |
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
