Palm Beach Post writer and a House Divided...

Randy Schultz, a writer for the Palm Beach Post, wrote about the current political climate fraught with Red state and Blue state viewpoints, a electronic sectarianism defining our present situation. He makes a great case for the increased tribalism in Washington where tribal divisions prevent progress on just about any issue.

The societal transformation stems from a profound switch in media-- the changeover from print media to electronic media. We expect our electronic media to do what the electronic media once did-- organize thoughts expressed by a public comprised of individual viewpoints. The new media environment comes simultaneously, explained Marshall McLuhan, not in an orderly, visual fashion like the print media of old. The new media environment is auditory and full of emotion with no clear boundaries. Auditory information, like music, arrives without boundaries. It is not like the orderly progression of words across the page. Auditory information arrives constantly from all directions and changes constantly.

"Ours is a brand-new world of allaonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening.

"At high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.

"Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition."

* from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (p.63)

Schultz comments that the different tribes, conservatives and liberals, stand in isolation from each other. Ideologically we may be very divided but, as McLuhan explains, we are profoundly involved with one another and there-in lies the rub-- we rub up against each other endlessly!

Whatever Gets You Through the Night

As we all are now authors, creators, writers, bloggers, tweeters, philosophers, facebookers, yarn spinners, gossips, ranters, hyperbolic exaggerators and tall tale tellers... how can we discern any truth or quality of thought amidst the myriad voices? And then again, maybe there never was anything that  original said by the poets outside of Shakespeare and a few Greek myths. Oh, I know, I’m being very Western in my thinking, not to mention reductivist and nihilistic. Everybody has a favorite author and truthfully maybe you only remember a phrase or even a single word that stuck with you but somehow that unique parcel of words really resonated for you and made your life better.

Bobby Dylan is quite the wordmeister... and the accompanying tunes only make it easier to remember his poetry.

Don’t the brakeman look good Mama

Flagging down the Double E?

(It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry-- from Highway 61 Revisited album)

And for something a little more cynical from Bob...

Pump don’t work

‘Cause the vandals took the handles.

(Subterranean Homesick Blues—from Bringing It All Back Home album)

So in the space of a few seconds I put my depressive notion to rest. The thought nobody really has anything to say is far from true. Fact is, what do we have except what people have to say. Those people, those viewpoints help make reality real for us by giving it a name, an explanation, a hypothesis. For what is art except a point of view expressed artfully... and we all need art to get us through the night. Science can provide a sleeping pill but the narcotic effect wears off and the thought machine springs back into action.

And in conclusion I refer once again to the eminent Bob Dylan... and Subterranean Homesick Blues... (and make it your Ringtone if you like! Oh there I go getting all jaded and ironic.)

Get sick, get well, hang around a ink well....