Be warned–as we so often prove we love being–yes, warned; we love to be warned about harm, as much as we like being frightened by our media, titillated by a broadcast and print media insistent on overdramatizing the news, creating news based on the demands of sensationalism, irrespective of truth or value as news. News does have a value, a need, either determined by the demands of the Truth or in the case of most of America’s Yellow Press . . . what is this about the press being Yellow–most of it is driven by scandal ongoing. The Brian Williams affair only reinforces this notion of mine that the news has little idea what Truth is, and in effect have so relativized all minor ‘t’ truths . . . the desire for Truth does not exist in the news; we have been overwhelming subsumed by doubt, doubt and more doubt everywhere without a drop of truth to drink. News is in a desert.
Mr. Williams is in broadcast and not print–yet each is all of a piece, both of them conglomerated. Yes, I must warn you that the trite, the cliche, the complacent or any one of the many, many received ideas of our culture and civilization are not to found herein except when questioned, critiqued or explained; exposition must always include appropriate explication. Dogmas are always scrutinized as they must be by any people wanting to be or claiming to be free–democracy demands debate, but not endless ping ping of opinions that in the end must reach consensus. Americans need consensus because they have been taught to–no, trained to– expect and accept nothing other than consensus.
We can all disagree in this pseudo-democratic nation managed by power elites bent on keeping the masses semi-educated and semi-literate–but consensus in the end is the mandate. To disagree with mandated consensus is to excommunicate and anathema, socially. The dogma of all Americans acting Americanly is reach consensus after we disagree in an exchange, a ping ping match of monologues. There is no democratic dialogue in America. If we had dialogue, real trenchant democratic dialogue, we would not need to scramble for consensus after extending our disagreements into tangentially drawn monologues, themselves more reminiscent of our collective psychosis than anything resembling a healthy expression of democracy in action. It’s absurd; it’s grotesque; this demand for consensus. There isn’t even a thread of coalition drawn up in the paradigms of these consensus.
This idea has nothing to do with and mostly opposes democracy, democratic action. The kind of consensus that societal norms demand is thus the kind of thinking and acting one finds in totalitarian societies. Do not imagine that it has not already happened here. We used to say that when fascism comes to America it will come as Americanism–the real horror is that it is not fascism or Nazism or Zionism or Bolshevism, but America’s brand of totalitarian rule, Americanism, without it being any of the former mentioned four isms. Totalitarianism is totalitarianism–a truth revealed in tautology. I am not trying to be facetious, no more than a Buddhist is when he says good is good, bad is bad and both exist . . . because they do and there is no reductionism in this in the way we mean to make pejorative any attempt to streamline our focus on what is.
The Falling Leaf Review 