UPDATED The Illiteracy of the Annointed

UPDATE: Re edited for clarity--DT

The ivory tower elites--and the media on the elites' payroll--are busy hypnotizing the masses, who for the most part do not have a clue how far down the primrose path they are being led.

Once upon a time there were statesmen with high principles who put those principles and country above their egos and vanity. George Washington could have been President for life--but he cared more for the new country he had helped to build than for his own power.

Newt Gingrich often speaks about the 1860 Campaign, in preparation for which Abraham Lincoln toiled for weeks in the library doing research for what would be a very long speech. This was a speech of substance, not sound bytes, and it addressed the enormously serious and consequential issues of the day. He talked about: morality, keeping the Union together and ending slavery. He talked about nuances between States' rights and the needs of the nation as a whole. He anticipated what his critics would say, and wrote out well thought out, reasoned arguments for each position he took. He would deliver that speech in three northeastern cities, most famously at Cooper Union in New York City, in February 1860, 9 months before the election. All the Northern newspapers printed the speech in its entirety, and it is believed that about 80% of the electorate in the Northern states read the whole thing.

Then Lincoln went home. He did not deliver another speech until after the election. When Lincoln would be repeatedly approached by reporters asking him where he stood on the enormous problems facing the divided nation, he would say that if he gave any answer outside what he had set forth in his speech, it would only be twisted, taken out of context, and sensationalized by the press, which he found to be counterproductive. So instead, Lincoln pretty much told anyone who would ask: go read the speech--it's all there. Perhaps it was this dogged refusal to produce other "sound bytes" that compelled such a large percentage of people to actually read that speech.

Fast forward to the present: we live in an Internet Age, where virtually anyone on the planet can see what any US candidate is saying, no matter where they are saying it. Or instead, they might choose to tune into what is now called "news" in the name of "staying informed". This "news" is the antithesis of Lincoln, because all context is removed completely in favor of the world view of the Elite mouthpieces reading that news. Their world view is informed by tenured Marxist journalism professors in the Colleges their parents paid to "educate" them, or by the mob mentality of the latest virulent strain of Political Correctness. Their ideas are pop culture-driven, not idea-driven. So we have: sound bytes to describe other sound bytes which the candidates throw out in speeches specially tailored for the "news" cycle.

We pretend that we have made such enormous progress since 1860. There is no denying that we have made great technological progress since then; our society is much more egalitarian now, having ended slavery and learned for the most part not to judge a man by his skin color, but by his accomplishments, ideas, and character. Unfortunately we seem to not have taken this lesson to how we elect Presidents, Senators, or Congressmen. You see, we are lazy now: fat and happy because of America's unparalleled wealth and prosperity. We take it all for granted now, and we do not consider how quickly what we have could disintegrate. To actually pay attention to things like ideas and character require actual effort. Why go to that trouble when some egomaniacal arrogant ex-sportscaster--or his sidekick the former Jimmy Carter speechwriter; or perhaps some 'Liberation Theology' pastor--can tell you how to think or who you should vote for, or why you would be "stupid" to think otherwise?

Instead of substance, we now elect Presidents based on the thirty second "feel good" phrases designed by political consultants, which the networks want you to see (or, if the candidate happens to be a Republican, perhaps they will instead air 30 seconds of the worst "flub" of the day or else the most controversial statement...). Meanwhile most people continue walking through their lives in a trance, taking for granted lies sold as truth by the elites, and not caring either way. It reminds me of that wonderful film Quiz Show, where we begin to see just how much of what we assume to be "reality" is in fact manipulated by the Elites to a point of unrecognizability. If the people really knew how much they were being manipulated you would think they would feel compelled to rise up in outrage and put a stop to the madness; but I am not sure that they really would.

The dirty secret it that the Elites purposefully do not communicate serious truths about policy debates, nor about the valid alternatives for dealing with those problems; this is because to do so would be to enlighten the public to then vote for people whom the Elites do not support. The Elites prefer to leave the clueless, star-struck masses with an "impression" (usually a false one) designed to paint one candidate in a misleading, warm, "soft light"; meanwhile they will paint the (usually Conservative) opponent in cold, harsh "klieg lights". The "why" of this is easy: it takes power out of the hands of an informed citizenry and places it in the hands of an elite few: namely themselves and the big money Leftists who pander to them.

Sometime the elites succeed in snowing the public, other times the public is able to get past the propaganda. But the advantage usually goes to the media's darling, because the media believes that most Americans do not have the intelligence or patience to do the hard work of getting to the bottom of what these paper mache candidates really stand for. I was taught in my college Communications class that the average television show is geared for the 7th grade level; personally I think that is too high. As to 80% of the voting population becoming intimately familiar with a candidate's position (1860), we are lucky if 45-50% even know who the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, or their own Congressman or Senators are!

How far we have come...

Which brings us to Barack Obama. You will recall a couple of weeks ago when Obama--to try and diffuse the bigotry, white-baiting, and America-hating rhetoric which his "spiritual guide" had been parroting for 20 years--gave a speech in Philadelphia that was to be the "definitive conversation about race". In that speech he said that he could no more disown his pastor than he could disown the entire African-American community. This was a speech that Chris Matthews termed "the greatest speech about race in this country since Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. No hyperbole there...

Mark Steyn comments on the modern day equivalent of Lincoln in 1860, in yet another of his masterful columns:

Four score and seven years ago… No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’s Apology, etc: It’s history. He said, apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week he did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time — which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection. Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing AIDs to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that — that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the — the commonality in all people.”

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s — that’s a show of disrespect to me.”

And we can’t have that, can we? In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline website remarked on the senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course, he is the change we’ve been waiting for. ...

Read the rest.

And so, we come to a sad conclusion: America had a much better chance of electing the right person for the job in 1860 than it does today, because--and despite our technological progress--Americans then were much more informed per capita on the issues and where each candidate stood than they are today. The tragedy of that cannot be overstated, especially in a time when there are real existential threats to our lives and our country; more so than...well--in reality--since the 1860's.

The Left and the media elites are destroying my country. How long is it going to take for the people to wake up, snap out of it and get serious? As Mr. Ledeen likes to say: Faster, please.