There are always a few on the fringe who cannot manage their anger. So set aside the fact that it happens so regularly in this country, and not others. What is going on here?
My first impulse today was to go back and reread Marshall McLuhan on the power of radio. McLuhan was a scholar and a fad of the 1960’s – he even made an appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. His famous assertion was that “media is message,” or that content is not so important as the vehicle that delivers it. He broke down media into “cool” and “hot.” Cool medium requires high participation – say for instance, the television show South Park, with its cutout characters and so few people doing voices, requires us to fill in the details of personality for the characters. That takes real effort on our part.
Right wing radio listeners are remote and inaccessible to debate or reason, virtually intellectual slaves to the talk radio host. When he makes them angry, they have nowhere to go with that anger.
…the immediate aspect of radio [is] a private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the scripted writers, with few exceptions. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real. (McLuhan’s emphasis)
However, McLuhan believed that more advanced societies are less susceptible to the drumbeat of radio.
Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.
In the U.S., the talk radio phenomenon is almost entire exhibited by the far right wing. “Left” talk radio doesn’t travel well or draw much audience. Could this be the reason for something painfully obvious at every Tea Party rally, every Sarah Palin speech, every fundamentalist religious gathering … that these are not literate people? Could the failure of left-wing talk be simply due to the fact that the left side of our narrow spectrum in the U.S. is more literate?
There are many, many Jared Loughner’s running around today looking for signs or signals to act up. Indeed they are crazy. Most right wingers are not that – my impression is that they are over-matched. They are angry and looking for someone to be angry at. It’s an easy step for a politician or any other provocateur to channel that anger.
We need, once more, to revisit the wisdom of the past. The FCC in 1949 was way ahead of us.
Piece of Mindful 
Jared was listening to his I-Pod, not his radio.
LikeLike
Off Topic-saw this and thought you’d get a chuckle.
http://curmudgeonlyskeptical.blogspot.com/2011/01/nietzche-is-dead.html#links
LikeLike
I wonder what McLuhan would think of the Internet. It is certainly highly participatory.
iPods are similar to radio in that it is one-way communication and the listener is isolated. Isn’t limbaugh podcasted&
LikeLike
the decline of literacy is a serious problem. you should check out a book by a neurologist named Leonard Shlain, titled “The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess” he looks at the introduction of alphabets and the correlation between that and a neurological shift from right-brain feminine oral tradition cultures to left-brain masculine patriarchal cultures. it’s a fascinating read.
oh, and i love McLuhan; should be required reading in school if school was actually intended to create humans capable of critical thinking.
LikeLike
McLuhan makes great sense of the shift from symbolic to phonetic writing. Sounds a bit like your Schlain.
LikeLike
The shift now is from hand-written language to keystrokes. Writing words by hand helps with reading, and comprehension of what’s being read. How’s our reading these days?
Text messaging is a developing separate language to the exclusion of our former language: English. If you don’t know the language, it’s pretty hard for tribes to cooperate and gain whatever opportunities come with joint ventures.
LikeLike
Nice try, Trotsky, but no stuffed bunny.
Hey, I know you are still bent out of shape over the failure of leftwing talk radio, but, please, live with it. You will just have to settle for being brained douched by the facile folks at NPR.
Here is my response to the Billings Gazette on this topic, which serves as a pretty good response to your pseudo-intellectual slush:
///
First it was Hollywood movie violence, then television violence, then video game violence, then Internet cyber-violence, and now it is talk radio violence. I won’t have a single damn electronic device in my house before this is over!
Maybe I will have to go back to reading books.
///
“There are many, many Jared Loughner’s running around today looking for signs or signals to act up. Indeed they are crazy.”
Yeah, have you checked out the crop over at 4&20 Blackgirls?
LikeLike
You’re opening a can of worms here. First, I don’t care about left wing talk radio … my only question is – is it interesting? There was a show on years ago that had Pat Buchanan and Barry Lynn on opposite sides of the table – a true conservative and a true liberal. That is what appeals to me – the exchange. They were two smart guys.
Regarding violence, I don’t know if visual violence on TV and movies inspires or is a release. If a bad guy is done up right and then killed, it’s cathartic for me.
And McLuhan did not talk about violence – his specialty was media and society, and he found radio to be the most able to spread propaganda.
Then there is the authoritarian specter – the right wing is crawling with such people – they both need to follow and exert control over others at once. This personality type simply doesn’t exist on the right. So virtually all the violence we see of the kind seen over the weekend is right-wing inspired, and for that, talk radio certainly sets the atmosphere.
LikeLike
The liberal news outlets are having a nervous breakdown, which has been coming on since the last election. It was just a matter of time before they found some event that they could pour all their fear and hatred into, some pretext to express all their paranoid delusions about America.
Other than every liberal simultaneous bursting out in angry tears as if all of them were connected to the same electrical circuit, McLuhan is no help here. Yes, the liberals have their own little electronic village and their tribal chant, but you cannot analyze the thought processes of hysterical people.
The Arizona shooter might very well be crazy, but based on the bizarre pronouncements coming from the liberal media, it is fairly obvious that he has a lot of company.
LikeLike