A Small Measure of Enlightenment

It used to really rile me up that people like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson had jobs. Not only jobs, but well-paying, high-profile jobs that could help them coerce women to sexually fondle them with loofahs (remember that Bill?). It was a mixture of anger at how they would boldly lie, bully, take out of context, and deliberately spread propaganda on behalf of the neo-con right wing of the Republican party and their masters Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. I couldn't stand how they could be so wrong, and how so many people could listen to them and assume what they said had any bearing on reality. Most of all, I was panicked that the people who did listen to these idiots and those like them would go out and vote and perhaps breed to create more people to vote like them. This scared me to no end as I saw the country descend into a murky abyss where we'd spend more time debating gay marriage and saying 'Merry Christmas' than on important things like the national deficit, global politics, and of course Congressional hearings on steroids in MLB.

But recently things changed. I attribute this newfound enlightenment to a number of possible factors. Perhaps I realized that life is short and my time is too valuable to waste being angry about these things I cannot change. I just go about assuming that 50% of all the things Bill O'Reilly says are flat out wrong, and the other 50% is not worth knowing. Or at least, not worth knowing from him. I can't change the fact that someone chose to give him a show to vent his vitrol, but I can control whether I pay him any attention. I would make some analogy to a wound that would heal if you stopped paying attention to it, but really, most cuts on the roof of my mouth have 10 times more impact on my day to day than Bill O'Reilly. He can't make me angry if I don't watch him or pay attention to the things he says. And there's no reason for me to pay attention to the things he says. In light of this, why bother?

Maybe some of the ability to push people like Papa Bear out of my mind comes from the fact that I understand why he is the way he is and why he makes me angry. Part of it may come from the man that calls O'Reilly by that mocking pet name, Stephen Colbert. When the Colbert Report launched, it cemented in my mind the fact that the O'Reilly Factor and shows of that ilk are designed to make me angry. They are based on the cult of personality. The show sells to people who see the character as a caricature of their own beliefs and feelings, someone who is the larger than life embodiment of your personal opinions. The problem is the only way he can maintain his personality is to be belligerent, provoking an emotional response. If people like him engaged you on an intellectual or rational level, he'd no longer be a personality. Therefore he has to engage you on a baser instinct. In order to do that, he has to get more and more absurd, more and more outrageous. There is not limit to how insane you can sound. There is a limit to when the majority of rational people stop listening to you. (This is part of my 20-60-20 idea, but that is for another time, another post.) As people tuned him out, he's had to become more controversial to try and keep his current fans and try and attract new ones. But one day, he'll have tuned out enough rational Americans that he'll have no angry, stammering, callers who call in and try and make a counter-point, and with no one to shout at, his nonsense is awfully silent. Normally I would pity a fool on an errand of diminishing returns, but it would take a lot for me to pity Bill O'Reilly.

As for the Fox News faithful, the legions of the unwashed uninformed, I don't mind it so much. If a reasonably literate person here in the United States, with the access we have to knowledge and information, still decides to get their news from talking heads, then there's not enough reason inside that person's head for it to be worthwhile to debate them. They just do not have the frame of reference needed to do anything except make you angry; you can't debate the size of the equator if your opponent does not agree that the earth is flat. What is accomplished by trying to persuade or argue with a person that believes this stuff? More importantly, as the talking heads have gotten more out of hand, the fewer people are already listening to them. As per this, http://mediamatters.org/columns/200801290001, albeit Media Matters is a very left-leaning blog, a lot of their reasons make sense. Even the Democratic party has gotten wise to the fact that there is no point in debating on Fox News. They won't listen and they won't let you speak, so how can you change their minds?

So, in light of all this, let old Bill O off the hook. It's ok, he knows he's wrong, but it's too late now. If he starts being reasonable, his whole world would collapse.