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All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers
for release 03-09-07
Washington DC
I'm nobody special. I am like most people, I live in my family and my job and my community and I occasionally get out to the grocery store and the mall and various restaurants, the rare concert or theatrical performance (because I prefer to attend these events by television because the seats are better and I can bring my own refreshments.) I'm average. I have to build my picture of the larger world the same way that Will Rogers did. "All I know is what I read in the papers."
But the papers aren't what they used to be. Namely the only game in town. When Hearst or Pulitzer told your great-grandfather that the evil Spanish had sunk the USS Maine, gramps had very little further information about the event with which to compare. Now our window on the world is wider. We have radio and television and movies that can remind us of inconvenient truths and billboards and commercials that usually tell us convenient lies and now we have the internet which is the perfect instrument for doing comparisons. Every citizen-blogger is a sleuth.
Even though average joes like you and me still live in the small worlds of our kitchens and living rooms and our offices, the grocery store and on the freeway where we are either listening to NPR or Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. My point is that we have the choice. We are able to, and we should, compare the voices and the pictures and the ideas. The Poet's Eye sees that it is possible to discern the whole truth from a panoply of half-truths and conjecture and even from outright lies, oh yes, lies can help us in our search for the truth. especially if we notice from which lips the lies are issued.
Imagine yourself as a fawn in the forest. To survive, you must synthesize all sounds and smells and tactile winds and visions. These are all local events. To understand the world beyond the range of our own senses, we little fawns have to depend on communication and observations made by others and what we have come to fondly refer to as The Media. We must depend upon the integrity and the reportage and the interpretation and analysis or the agenda or the prejudices of those that tell us the news. Anyone who has ever played any ball-game knows how important spin can be. In football you have the spiral pass, in baseball the curve pitch depends on spin. In bowling you want your ball to hit the pins spinning. And I'm sure that it's no accident that in the dirty game of pool, when you put spin on the ball it's called 'english.' which is the same device that reporters and journalists and commentators and politicians use to impart spin.
Maybe I've been watching too much cable TV. I'm numbed by the endless speculation and punditry about who will be elected mis-congeniality in the next beauty contest that is still two years away. And then there seems to be this fascination with child molesters and rapists and every imaginable stripe of pervert and weirdo and insect that Nancy Grace can root out of the rotten bark of our society so they can have Way more than their biblically alloted fifteen minutes of fame. And the video game that the war in Iraq has become and the soap opera of our government. It's just according to where your dial is set as to what you believe at the moment, the moment before you twist the dial. And you Should twist the dial, and often. Compare, compare, compare. In this way, we average joes might get an approximation of the truth.
All I know is what I read in the papers.
--Will Rogers
you see what you want to see
and you hear what you want to hear
--Oblio
Me and my arrow
Straighter than narrow
Wherever we go, every one knows
It's me and my arrow
- Harry Nilsson
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