Sunday Morning Thought Crime

I'm sitting here Sunday morning reading through the headlines on Google News. I just read a Newsday article about the claims at GOP convention about Kerry's National Defense voting record. Lets just say they point out most of the claims are distortions of the truth at best and out right lies at the worst. Here is a link I don't want to get into that debate right now. Its not my point here. To my point in a minute.

Now lets say that the Time and Newsweek polls are dead on accurate and all the other polls follow and the RNC convention had its intended effect. It turned the country against Kerry. As one of my good friends has stated many times, the voters are not informed and don't usually look for the truth past what they are told on TV.

Lets flip it around. Although the DNC convention didn't attack bush, let's say they did using lies and distortions and let's say it had the intended effect. They turned the country against bush using distortions and lies. It stuck and Kerry won because the voter don't look past what TV says.

Are we a better stronger country when our leaders are chosen this way? Isn't it a form of thought control with media complicity to manufacture a specific result using lies and distortions? Is winning more important than the truth? And if so who is really winning?

One of the tactics of riot police is to divide the riot into manageable small chunks. I believe politicians are using wedge issues to divide the country into smaller manageable chunks of voting blocks so they are more easily managed. Latinos, Gays, Christians, Southerners, Northerners, Fly-Overs, etc. so they don't have to have a broadly reaching message. I also think that they are specifically avoiding the broad issues or at least dissecting them into smaller issues and using the smaller part to represent the larger issue. Gay Marriage is a good example of this. The broader issue is gay rights, but the politician have broken it down to a single issue of gay marriage. This is highly divisive, a good wedge and a very small part of the larger issue. Conversely they are taking multiple issues and lumping them into a broader issue to avoid talking about the specifics. I think the National Security is a good example of this. Neither party is breaking down national security into its parts and discuss things separately. The War in Iraq, The hunt for Bin Laden, Domestic Security, Privacy, Defense spending, Racial Profiling etc. Both sides are happy to keep national security in a larger context of a war on terrorism so they don't have to really talk about it. They are both happy to say if you take a stand on one of these issues it effects the larger war on terrorism in a certain way. This is a big wedge and its being wielded like a hammer these days to avoid the specifics, especially in regards to Iraq.

Lets be honest about terrorism. Most of the people in the most danger from terrorism live in the big cities and they overwhelmingly support Kerry. Most of the people in very little danger of terrorism live in the country and they overwhelmingly support Bush. There isn't much difference between these two on terrorism/homeland security. So how did the perception that one would be better than the other get manufactured? Why would the people with the least to gain from a candidate who is running on an terrorism platform be so overwhelmingly supportive and the ones in the most danger not? Weird isn't it.

So whose job is it to find the truth? Whose job is it to keep the issues dissected and focused the way they should be and make sure the truth is presented? Isn't that the press? Shouldn't they be held accountable because of the guaranteed freedom in the Constitution? And what do we do about it? I worked for a media company and they took great pains to keep their advertiser, their customers, happy but didn't take the same pains to find the truth. they just spew the talking points. In the run up to the war they never questioned any of it. None of the American press did. Why? I read their papers everyday, watched their TV news and consumed their product until I couldn't stand it anymore. It almost as if we consider the perception of the truth more important than the truth itself. I was told time and time again that perception is reality. No matter how right I was it was all about how the customer perceived that truth. That was my undoing in corporate America and what sent me running to the woods of New Hampshire.

So if perception is reality and that perception is based on lies and distortions isn't our reality wrong? If reality is what you see around and we are seeing the wrong thing aren't we missing the true reality?

Plato discusses this type of perception vs. reality in The Allegory of the Cave. He describes people who, for their entire life, have been shackled in cave facing the back wall. Behind them is a bright fire. They can't turn their heads to see the fire or anything else behind them. Objects are walked in front of the fire to cast a shadow on the wall before the people. These shadows become their reality. When a horse is walked in front of the fire, for instance, the shadow of the horse is called a horse by the people. That shadow is the horse to the shackled people rather than its true form.

Has the American voting public become those people shackled in the cave? If so, is there any hope?