INSTRUMENTS OF TERMINATION
Mass media and social media do
seem to serve the purposes of the Trump administration well. Despite its
commitment to inform the public, mass media use half-truths and lies to
frustrate the process of thinking in the United States of America. Its agencies
profit from the enterprise. Its agents take
delight in toying with issues and ideas, providing scant evidence one might use
to make judgments. They perform scripts
and entertain; they do not tax themselves to specify frames of reference. The audience is saturated with whatever can
be easily improvised.
Social media, on the other
hand, is more transparent about its artifice.
Driven by legions of passion, users eschew collective
responsibility. Responsibility, particularly
the ethical variety, does not fit well with the orgasm of expression. Subjective, highly individual reductions of
the actual to the real flourish. No
explanation is needed, because all of us who use social media are secure with
our tribal identities, and we blithely assume the individual is the herd.
Reading Gustave LeBon's
sociological classic, The Crowd
(1895), intensifies belief that both mass and social media treat ideas as
"the daughters of the past and the mothers of the future, but throughout
the slaves of time." Slaves of
time? Yes. LeBon's words blacken our eyes so that we might see better. A
concentrated gaze exposes just how female and feminist the United States of
America has become in 2017. Yes, the
trace of sexism is most visible. The
possibility energizes President Trump to deploy the tweet with maximum force,
to use it as his primary instrument of termination. And what does he desire to terminate? Democracy as we once pragmatically understood
it. And he wills to replace democracy
with new and improved fascism, the necessary and sufficient condition for
making his nation great. Mass media and
social media massage us to be comfortable with the blessings of a want-to-be
dictator.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. March
14, 2017
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