From a recent incoming letter:
> In your next email, could you say something about
> Kerry's inane ambiguous ramblings during the debate? SNL
> attacks both sides, and I'm pretty convinced you're more
> intelligent than they are, so I know you can do it.
Your faith in me is, alas, misplaced. After all, I read philosophy and actually like it, so naturally I don't see Kerry's ability to make distinctions other than binary ones as ambiguous (ambivalent, yes, I should ardently hope) nor certainly as inane. He makes sense to me, occasionally good sense, whereas Bush has for ten years struck me, no less when he was governor of my home state, as obviously, embarassingly and, today, dangerously simple-minded. I wish merely that Kerry would play to the center by making naturally vigorous appeals to liberal principles (e.g. the rule of law) a la Dean and Nader, rather than making unnaturally vigorous appeals to violence; his 'kill terrorists' rhetoric is most definitely inane, and clearly an unnatural play to the middle, as well as politically unwise and morally tarnished. Last time I checked, fighting hatred, violence and injustice with hatred, violence and injustice wasn't a Christian value. They're all playing up the rhetoric of hate, and they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Some deluded little Indian fellow once said that "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," and, inexplicably, managed to parlay this nonsense into the liberation of the second-most-populous country on Earth; he was soon followed by a similarly deluded and also deeply religious black upstart in the American south, who parlayed similar nonsense, again inexplicably, into a massively successful political movement. It boggles the mind! Such utopian claptrap would never work on us today, of course; we're much more clever, and will never again fall for starry-eyed metaphysicians the likes of Jesus and Gandhi and King. Turning the other cheek, indeed! How, to use Bush's word, "naïve." When someone wants to kill you, you root him out of his 'hole' -- they invariably hide in 'holes,' of course -- and kill him. It's important to 'kill,' and it's particularly important to use that word to get the NASCAR ( = violent Hollywood blockbuster = violent poular/profitable video-game) vote. To 'bring to justice' is just more of that same old religious utopian idealism, and we don't believe in that silly stuff anymore. Worst of all, it's boring; what fun is a Terminator who says "hasta la vista" only to come back and sympathize, meditate, communicate? Christian values make for SUCH bad sales today that even Christians (Gibson) can't sell them in popular form unless they're slathered in gore. And what a relief! Thank heavens for Bush's realpolitik, because Kerry's religious fanaticism -- you did know that about Kerry, didn't you? -- would get us all killed.
Kerry is oleaginous, excessively diplomatic, a lamentable political robot a la Gore. I don't care for him and may well not vote for him. But Bush is a hypocrite and a fool, and that's worse: he's too stupid even to see his own hypocrisy. Together they make an extremely accurate reflection of the American electorate: polite instead of right, ignorant instead of malicious. And have no doubts that politeness and ignorance are vile: the Weimar Germans who elected Hitler as chancellor were sophisticated, polite, well-mannered, repressed, self-eluded and utterly schizophrenic. We have every right to worry about more 9/11s; we have just as much right to worry about more 1939s, and both sorts of violence -- individual and collective, rebellious and institutional -- occur every day, around the world, now. When 'we' get hit, regardless of who 'we' are, it's news; when 'we' hit it's not. And this should come as no surprise: men have always been immoral, selfish cowards. In 20 years we'll look back and say "O, we hit then, yes we did, that was wrong of us," just as today we look back on the puppet-propping policies of the middle-20c and rue them -- from the safe position of history's winner -- caveatting "O but that was then, we're very moral now." Mankind is rather obviously not 'more moral'; the world, however, is measurably slightly wealthier, and therein lies what 'progress' we observe. It's easier to share when you're not competing over limited resources.
How I do run on. I guess it's all those dead bodies that wrongful politics generates. Sentimental me.
As for SNL, I could never hope to compete with that particular standard of political discourse. And give some thought to the relationship between ad-supported pop TV entertainment and the 50-50 political split in the general TV-watching U.S. audience. If consuer entertainment doesn't play to the audience, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, if we assume that SNL's core audience already leans liberal, its producers can't raise profit margins by appealing yet more to the left.
Commercial media are nothing more than well-researched, well-designed and obviously successful money-extraction machines; networks generate profits, nor small ones. Also obviously, they may continue to function successfully as long as they know their audience better than their audience knows itself. The principle is simple; its application merely requires good social science and a bad educational system. These things are, again obviously, easily had.
It once -- about 1,000 years ago -- occurred to Christians that profit was fundamentally immoral. Today, Christians in America line up behind the politics of profit. Democrats whine a bit before selling their souls to Mammon. If there were a hell, cupiditous profiteers would go there. Since we're all cupiditous profiteers, we obviously don't believe in hell anymore. The lip service we pay it recalls nothing so much as the false piety of the Satan of Christian lore.
