Ratiocination

I get up each morning (at a ridiculous hour) and settle in with coffee and a well-lit easy chair and read. That time is my favorite time of day. Right now I have several books going, and where once I would try to work my way through them as if they were assigned reading, I now allow them to penetrate the cranium and stop whenever I’ve had enough, or as a famous Far Side cartoon once had a student asking a teacher: “May I be excused? My brain is full.” (In that cartoon, Gary Larson drew the kid with an unusually small head compared to the kids around him.)

There’s a reason for the video above, and I will get to it in short order. But first I want to thank commenter TimR for recommending the book Life: The Movie, by Neal Gabler to me. I’ve got a long way to go, because, you know, my brain fills up quickly, but the following entry caught my attention this morning, right around 3:45 AM:

“Neil Postman, one of the most brilliant and articulate critics of popular culture, say the Graphic Revolution* inaugurating a whole new way of appropriating information that would ultimately change the nature of information itself. In Postman’s view, each medium is a “unique mode of discourse” that enforces  its own ideas of intelligence. Print demanded ratiocination.** “To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning,” Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death. It followed that a predominantly print-based society, as America’s was  until the late nineteenth century, while not necessarily one coruscating*** with intellectual brilliance, nevertheless was one in which logic, order and context prevailed. An image-based society, on the other hand, dispensed with all these because images did not demand them. How much logical discipline did one need to recognize a picture?” (pp 54-55)

I have acquaintances who, thankfully, while aware of this blog I write, do not read it. So I can speak freely here of two conversations. On separate occasions each stated quite bluntly “I (we) do not read.” The last time was in response to my recommending something in writing to one of them, and the tone of the response, while not harsh, was final: “Don’t try to approach us with printed word. We only do images.”

This is a commentary on our state of existence, and why so much propaganda passes from the governing forces down to not just common, but all people with such ease. There seems to be no natural resistance. There is no logic, order or context needed to pass on ideas. Think, for a moment, about galvanizing images of our heritage:

• A Native American quietly weeping at the site of a polluted landscape;
• Ronald Reagan lighting up with open arms as his wife, Nancy entered the oval office.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laying on the floor next to a pool of blood, a young waiter crying over him.
• Several men in suits looking about over a small group crowd of disinterested onlookers as Martin Luther King, Jr. lay shot and killed on a balcony.
• Janet Jackson exposing her breast at a Superbowl performance with Justin Timberlake.
• Bruce Jenner running with an American flag after medaling in the decathlon.
• The body of a young girl with a river of blood running from her at Kent State University.
• Donald Trump defiantly raising a fist (and stupidly  exposing himself to further gunfire) after a bullet clips his ear.
• John F. Kennedy’s brain exploding on camera.
• Jane Fonda sitting in a gun turret in Hanoi, North Vietnam.

Dated images? Of course! But I’ve no doubt all readers of all ages here are familiar with, well, most of them. Cameras can capture essence, but in the hands of professionals, create their own reality. I would bet, with only verbal description as given above, that each of you can visualize the image I am describing. They were all contrived, planned, discussed, staged and photographed well in advance. None represented anything real.

Back to why I used the opening video. I am going to offer up two images below that took the place of  logic, order or context, that would have prevailed in a written-word society. The ideas promoted by these photos would be harshly ridiculed by people who could classify, make inferences, and reason. They would conclude that a hoax was afoot. 

In the top image, Karen Carpenter is receiving some kind of award for a track and field performance. [Context]: Perspective is messed up, with the hands of each woman being too close when the heads are at such a distance. Neither women in the photo is looking at  the other. [Logic]: Karen Carpenter was not a runner, hurdler, or distance runner. She was not built for such things, and anyway, had no time. That cannot her body. [Order]: Karen’s head is out of proportion to her body, as is that of the other woman, to the surrounding images in the photograph. Both heads are misplaced in that photo, pasted in from another venue.  

In the lower image, Karen’s face is distorted almost beyond recognition. [Logic]: For the face to be distorted in that manner, the underlying bones, the skull, would have to have been misshapen. I’ve never seen a disease, except for perhaps ALS (Stephen Hawking), that affects bone structure in that manner. [Context]: Karen is wearing a strapped top of some kind, and her shoulders appear normal. Her hair is normal, and the product of some work, perhaps a wig, as is common for celebrities. Her neck is not properly aligned with her head. I know of no disease that moves the head atop the neck in such a manner. [Order] Her smile is out of the ordinary for a person so ill, her teeth and gums oddly exposed as we might find in a refugee dying of starvation.

So, I was sitting at a dinner table with a small group, and one person there talked about how her parents had been big fans of the Carpenters, and how tragic Karen Carpenter’s early death was. Further, she added, anorexia is known to cause the head to grow very big. I sat in silence, my normal reaction. “Good God!”, I thought. She needs to be set straight, but I cannot override the “truth” of our era. 

Anyway, people suffering from starvation (anorexia, in this case) often have diminished bodies, rib cages exposed, skin sagging where underlying fat tissue has gone away. But the underlying bone structure is unchanged. The skull does not grow bigger. Where would the nutrients come from to cause that?

The point here is that the person relaying to me the idea that Karen Carpenter’s head was swollen and elongated by anorexia was reacting to seeing the photos above. Information was successfully and easily conveyed to her, and only by images. Karen didn’t die in 1983, and in fact I think I might have located her in Fort Myers, Florida one time using TruePeopleSearch, a resource that has become impossible to use due to misdirection and need for credit card information. She would have been 73 at that time, so it would have been 2023. (She and I were born a month apart in 1950.)

The list above the photos is our 20th Century reality, images that galvanized our thoughts and took the place of logic, order and context … skills we no longer possess. We are now more than ever in human history the product of manipulation via images. We are, as a result, deeply brainwashed and easily beguiled, fooled, and misled by news, television, movies and videos. Representative government is a joke, which helps me understand why votes are not counted, not really. If CIA Director Bill Casey is accurately quoted in 1981 saying “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” (since “debunked”, of course, by Quora and other easy sources), all I can say is “Mission Accomplished.” (Of course, those two words were uttered on television by President George W. Bush, and so belong in the list above.)

I opened this piece with Karen Carpenter and Ella Fitzgerald singing because each, at that time, possessed a beautiful singing voice. (I wonder now if Fil Henley of Wings of Pegasus, all over YouTube, will tell me they were just lip syncing.) It was just a treat for me to hear then, and then I quickly thought how hard it must now be for Karen to have been possessed of such talent, and then to have to live in her basement since 1983 (in Fort Myers?) practicing her drumming. At age 75, she won’t be recognizable in public, and so has freedom of movement. But her fairy tale life ended in 1983 when a business decision made by music moguls who determined that she and Richard’s brand of music had to be shitcanned, set aside, to make way for new genres,  the kind of noise that kids are now inured to and that are offensive to more sedate and dispassionate listeners, like me. We older people are not easily manipulated by music any more, but, you know, we have TV news to fill that void. 

__________

*Graphic Revolution: Term coined by Daniel Boorstein to describe the rise in visual imagery displacing the printed word, late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. 

**Ratiocination: Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning.

***Coruscate: To give forth flashes of light; sparkle and glitter,

PS: Three takeaways from this essay: Classify, make inferences, reason. I might also add, practice, practice, practice.