The American right’s political strategy

“It takes considerable skill to convince people that something that is clearly good for them – like universal healthcare – is not.” (Gary Young, “A Method to Their Madness” The Nation, 09/28/09) The base lives “in a political parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don’t like established facts, so they come armed with their own.”

Patricia Williams says that the key to understanding the right’s base is that their “sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy” so that “the world must seem even more terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.” “… it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down.” (Patricia J. Williams, “Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare” The Nation, 09/14/09)

What astonishes me is not that the right has disrupted and disoriented the national conversation not only among the “35 percent of the country … with whom there is no real means of engagement” but the entire nation. The Sept 28th editorial “The Ambush of Van Jones” says “… somehow a man working to help Americans invest in an alternative energy future ends us being branded an untouchable radical while a hysterical extremist’s delusions are validated.” (speaking of Glenn Beck’s fabricated controversy).

Yes, Young says, “Today the Internet distributes these slurs faster, and cable TV gives them more outlets.” But such media changes can’t account for the national political conversation’s plunge into paranoid lies. Nor is his facile accusation of “a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives” convincing. As the face of America twists into a surreal insanity, I struggle to comprehend how escalating feedback of corruption and media effects could be countered.

Visually Rich Communication

We’ve entered a universe of visual language memes, integrating emotive images with text. No longer are we limited to our own body language and facial expression. Anthropomorphized animal faces have invaded my self as surely as the automobile is an extension of the foot.

When Icanhascheezburger malfunctioned for two days, it was as if I had aphasia. I’d begun to think in this language, conjuring up LOLs to illustrate feelings as I composed posts.

Yesterday I saw a mobile computer called sixth sense, worn around the neck. It projects an interactive screen on any surface, and reads hand position to take commands. Baratunde was literally an image emitter. In meatspace, five years from now, we’ll be able to project images manually, to counterpoint our words.