Someone signed the Diversions e-mail account up for the "Conservative News Alerts" newsletter as a (genuinely funny) joke. The e-mails - an almost incredibly seductive blend of facts and editorializing - really are a joy to read; sentence after (bold, italicized, tri-color, highlighted) sentence of inchoate, hysterical, really exciting fear mongering builds up into a crazy whirl of unsupported opinion stated as fact. A charming example from the most recent e-mail we received: "But that wasn't enough and now, liberals are about to move heaven and earth to effectively eradicate conservative speech, thoughts and opinions by instituting the so-called Fairness Doctrine." ([SIC, emphasis theirs] The reader should note that the italics are also highlighted in yellow in the e-mail, and that the "Fairness Doctrine" is never actually explained in any greater detail by the newsletter's author, Floyd Brown.)
The subject line reads, "Schumer Equates Talk-Radio to Porn." This is fortuitous - a pretty outstanding coincidence, in fact - because I was already sort of planning on addressing talk-radio in my column this week anyway; this e-mail happily provides both a pretty sweet introduction to my topic and some solid examples of exactly the sort of pornographic (that is, as my trusty dictionary explains, a text "regarded as catering to a voyeuristic or obsessive interest in a specific subject") rhetoric I was going to talk about with regard to talk-radio.
Before we go any further, I should probably mention that I've just finished reading "Host," the late, labyrinthine David Foster Wallace's April 2005 cover story in the Atlantic (and one of very few of his essays available for free online). Wallace shadowed a controversial but up-and-coming Los Angeles talk-show host named John Ziegler for two months in '04, and the result is an enormous, extensively footnoted and exquisitely detailed long-form report that provides a fairly balanced look at the inner workings of talk-radio. Wallace far more elegantly outlines the state of the industry than I ever could, so I won't summarize it here, but the point from his article that I'd like to take is basically this: "Pornographic rhetoric" can be read above to mean, I suppose, "stimulation," which is the quite self-conscious function of talk-radio. Not "news." Not "fact." Entertainment.
Popular conservative rhetoric has come to be essentially linked to figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - all exemplars of the pundit-as-(adult-)entertainer model. It's sort of unfortunate, because the massive popularity of these figures creates a very real divide in the media; sadly, the fault line tends to run along the words "elitist" and "intellectual."
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Epimenides, an ancient Cretan philosopher, is famous for a single, immortal statement: "Cretans, always liars." He poses here a tricky logical paradox: He must be lying because he is a Cretan, but then his statement is rendered false and thus no longer necessitates the falsehood of his statement. Or, simply, the statement can be true if and only if it is false.
The easy way to change this sentence into a simple true/false statement is to change the speaker; if, for example, I made the statement "Cretans, always liars," I would either be right or wrong, with no troubling self-referential loops to worry about. Post-structuralist theorists use this paradox to illustrate the problem of discussing (with words) the instability of language. Ideally, one would be able to step outside of the spoken or written word when criticizing the way in which language functions, but unfortunately that is impossible.
I bring this up because of the light it sheds on a sticky sort of situation I've found myself in lately.
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