Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out BoBo

On this beautiful, sunny day, I settled in with a cup of coffee, some orange juice and a croissant, and opened up today’s issue of The New York Times.

And upon turning to the Op-Ed page, I encountered a truly awful smear of Al Gore (by David Brooks, which made me think of the Timothy Leary quote above somehow).

This also made me recall what surely must be one of the wingnut canons; when someone of “the left” writes or creates anything for a mass market, it must be ridiculed as soon as possible, and the more childishly this is done, the better.

I will probably read Gore’s “The Assault On Reason” one day, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon (staggering to the end of “State Of Denial,” and I haven’t forgotten about the “How We Got Here” posts, by the way – I just haven’t had time for them).

Brooks begins by assaulting Gore’s writing style, which admittedly is verbose (and I know a thing or two about that, I’ll admit). And in BoBo’s mind (since we’re talking about Al Gore, and Brooks must continue to reinforce the election year 2000 narrative of Gore being “wooden” and “not like us,” of course), that equates with pomposity.

And here is how Brooks pretends to compliment the book but instead tries to be witty…

“…Al Gore’s ‘The Assault On Reason’ is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.”

So Gore writes run-on sentences, making him pompous, but it also makes him strange as well - ??

Brooks notes what Gore says about the importance of the development of the printing press (that is, giving more and more ordinary citizens access to information to use as a source of one type of power or another), but ridicules Gore for criticizing the role TV plays in not just our political discourse, but everything else as well.

Here is what Gore said, according to Brooks…

“In Gore’s view, TV immobilizes the brain and stimulates the primitive, instinctive parts. TV creates a ‘visceral vividness’ that is not ‘modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought’.”

“T.V. allows political demagogues to exaggerate danger and stoke up fear…”

Gore then compliments the Internet as, “perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” thus giving Brooks an excuse to malign “most political blogs.”

Brooks then goes on to render something that I suppose is meant as a scientific criticism of Gore’s analysis, including such gems as, “without emotions like fear, the ‘logical’ mind can’t reach conclusions.”

Of course, Brooks is going to dismiss Gore’s concern about the influence of T.V. on what passes for political discourse in this country (and though the Internet isn’t too far removed from it, it does allow for interaction, of course). This is because without T.V., it is impossible for a political demagogue to hold sway and repeat lies to the point where they become if not actual truth, then some sort of accepted belief (of course, it is necessary to have an utterly pliant media to accomplish this also). And I’m not some whiz-bang New York Times columnist, but even I know that.

Brooks dismisses the danger of T.V.-oriented communications and interpretation of reality, but fortunately, other legitimate life sciences professionals don’t. In an excerpt from this article, Susan R. Johnson, M.D. writes on the effect of excessive television in early childhood development (and though Brooks, Gore and yours truly are attempting to communicate primarily to adults, I think some of what Johnson describes here is taking place with that audience also).

Watching television has been characterized as multi-leveled sensory deprivation that may be stunting the growth of our children's brains. Brain size has been shown to decrease 20-30% if a child is not touched, played with or talked to (Healy 1990). In addition when young animals were placed in an enclosed area where they could only watch other animals play, their brain growth decreased in proportion to the time spent inactively watching (Healy 1990). Television really only presents information to two senses: hearing and sight. In addition, the poor quality of reproduced sound presented to our hearing and the flashing, colored, fluorescent over-stimulating images presented to our eyes cause problems in the development and proper function of these two critical sense organs (Poplawski 1998).
…

Reading a book, walking in nature, or having a conversation with another human being, where one takes the time to ponder and think, are far more educational than watching TV. The television -- and computer games -- are replacing these invaluable experiences of human conversations, storytelling, reading books, playing "pretend" (using internal images created by the child rather than the fixed external images copied from television), and exploring nature. Viewing television represents an endless, purposeless, physically unfulfilling activity for a child. Unlike eating until one is full or sleeping until one is no longer tired, watching television has no built-in endpoint. It makes a child want more and more without ever being satisfied (Buzzell 1998).

This describes to me why nothing substitutes for the experience of reading a good book (and it also explains why I was so enraged by this story over the weekend).

If Brooks had decided to criticize Gore for recycling previously documented theories and concepts, that would have been one thing; books such as “A Nation Of Sheep” by William J. Lederer and “The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard have covered some of this territory before, though Gore, to his credit, updates this information with copious annotations in a scholarly manner. This was undoubtedly threatening to Brooks, who desires to monopolize any independent thought on these subjects and sees Gore as an intellectual threat.

With his incessant, utterly gratuitous personal attacks on Gore, though (to say nothing of his misinterpretation of what Gore says), Brooks ended up validating much of what Gore has so carefully documented and argued in his book. And if the consequences weren’t so tragic for our country, it would be worth it just to have a good laugh at Brooks’ expense.

And by the way, here is a much more substantive review of Gore’s book (from Brooks’ own newspaper, no less).

Update 5/30/07: Benjamin R. Barber of HuffPo has more.