“Is our political speech really more bitter and poisonous than it's ever been?”

Robert F. Kennedy (photo courtesy of Milkaddict.com)

Tim Rutten at the LA Times credits the Internet with contributing to and amplifying the vitriol in American politics. I suggested as much in a recent post in which I mentioned the obligatory sarcasm and cynicism that dominates the blogosphere, especially in anonymously posted diatribes. The uglier your attacks on those with whom you disagree, the more page views you’re likely to garner, and this is equally true for Left and Right-wing bloggers.

Rutten argues that political speech today does not reflect Bobby Kennedy’s America, due primarily to the technology that powers the new media. Rutten writes:

 

Is our political speech really more bitter and poisonous than it's ever been?

No, though it's certainly more debased and lacerating than it was just a few short years ago. We've been through eras of bitterly expressed politics more often than we'd probably care to admit. The Federalists and anti-Federalists bickered ferociously. Contention over the Bank of the United States during the Jacksonian era was fierce. The political rhetoric leading up to the Civil War was murderous. Franklin Roosevelt's policies were the target of vile opposition. And during the McCarthy period, intolerance abounded.

If there's a major difference between these other periods in which political expression was an ugly business and ours, it probably lies in the technology of speech. We live in an era saturated with communication of all sorts, and this has both radically democratized political speech and opinion and deprived it of any restraint or standard of responsibility.

Because we're literally bathed in politicized speech, which is different than political speech, when rhetoric turns ugly, it seems as if it is all around us because in some sense it is. In former eras we were buffered by constraints of time and distance, which new media have erased.

The Internet has been a great enabler of incivility, not only because it so easily allows the anonymous or pseudonymous expression of the most violent or hurtful opinions but because it reinforces the illusion of a virtual world in which there is nothing but speech. Anyone with a laptop or a smart phone can engage in endless wrangling with the political figures they know only as broadcast images flickering across the video screen. In such an environment, there is no need for the restraint or civility that is an essential part of dealing with flesh-and-blood people or the actual consequences of a real world.

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When the System Failed: A Holiday Weekend Without Phone Service or Internet

Hello, Katalusis readers!

I’m sorry I haven’t posted lately. On Thursday, December 25 at about noon my bundled landline telephone service and Internet connection failed, leaving me totally dependent on my cell until Sunday evening, Dec. 28.

The fact that I live on the fourth floor of a security building was an added inconvenience. My landline phone is programmed so that I can press a single key and instantly admit a guest; otherwise, I have to take the elevator downstairs to the lobby and manually open the door.

Although I didn’t notice any grammatical errors in my increasingly frustrated phone calls to the cable company, I could readily empathize with Professor Stanley Fish’s recent frustrations with AT&T, which he posted this morning at his blog Think Again (NY Times).

Professor Fish mentioned the first obstacle he encountered was getting through to a live person. That situation is even more depressing when you’re sitting there on hold wasting precious cell phone minutes while a syrupy recorded voice periodically interrupts promotional material to say, “Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us.” Eventually, I spoke to a live “account executive,” and scheduled an appointment for Sunday afternoon between 1 and 5 p.m.

My dinner guests arrived shortly before the system failed completely, and I was able to buzz them in. We had a happy Christmas/Chanukkah celebration. After dinner we watched Joyeux Noel, a 2005 film about the World War I Christmas truce of December 1914, depicted through the eyes of the French.

On Friday morning I called the cable company back to see if I could get an earlier appointment. I received a promise that if anything opened up, I’d be first in line.

On Sunday at around 4:30 p.m., I was re-reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on anger and carefully following his instructions on how to mindfully treat powerful emotions that are threatening to get out of control.

My cell’s cheerful ring tone interrupted my practice and in a calm, relaxed state of mind, I took the elevator downstairs to admit a bright-eyed, youthful technician who proved to be both courteous and competent. He had the problem solved within minutes.

After he left, I reflected on the post-holiday weekend and realized I’d gotten along fine without my usual political fixes from favorite news sites and blogs and thanks to my ever ready cell phone, I hadn’t actually been cut off from the world.

Just the same, dear friends, it’s good to be back.

Revisiting the Digital Life

Two weeks ago in this space I lamented my brand new TV’s stubborn “no signal” response,
even though I had carefully hooked it up to a rabbit-ear antenna designed for the digital age. My next door neighbor offered his technical expertise, but the best he could coax from my flat screen Memorex was reception worse than that of my 27-year-old analog model.

Poor TV reception was only one of my problems. As a blogger and free-lancer writer, I was using my dial-up connection to the Internet several hours a day, thus blocking incoming phone calls. It got so bad that my niece from Ohio contacted my son who lives here in St. Paul to express her concern; she had been unable to get through to me by phone.

Suddenly vulnerable to the cable company’s sales pitch, this long-term holdout bought the package including high-speed Internet, starter cable TV, and digital phone service with unlimited long distance. A week later, and my household is digital.

My TV viewing habits haven’t changed: better reception and more channels haven’t improved the quality of the programming, so I continue to turn my set off after the evening news. But I do enjoy whipping around the Internet at top speed, and unlimited long distance is an asset for a free-lance writer occasionally required to do out of state interviews.

In the meantime, I managed to keep my old phone number, but I’m still working on notifying contacts of my new email address. And I’ve only had to move a few pieces of furniture around to accommodate the location of the previously installed cable jacks in my apartment.

Now if I can just find the receipt so I can get back the $30.00 I paid for that rabbit-ear antenna that was supposed to work with a digital TV.