On Nov. 4, a rather important election will take place, culminating a campaign that some would call historic and that I would call never-ending.
As I prepare to cast my vote, my “news junky” affliction is becoming a true disease. I’m left wondering why I vote, why I care, and whether I still want to be a journalist in this bankrupt world of bailouts and cynicism. Over are the days when it was simple fun to laugh at absurd campaign slogans and atrocious election coverage by the mainstream media.
The ideology of “balanced reporting” is taken to such obtuse extremes as to allow one party or the other to go unchallenged for telling unabashed lies as long as someone from the opposite party chimes in to argue. The media will split the aisle on global warming, or lend semi-credibility to Sarah Palin’s insinuations that Barack Obama is a terrorist. Semi-credibility can be dangerous, too, you know.
Take another annoying mainstream media habit: adopting and proliferating words used by those in positions of authority over which the media is supposed to be a watchdog—like the adoption of “Main Street” after the presidential debates or, more dangerously, the immediate repetition of the word “crisis” in reference to Wall Street’s nosedive just minutes after George W. Bush’s speech on the matter. Such parroting is not without reason, but it does readily open itself to exploitation.
I even wonder sometimes if the media has allowed this race to stay closer than it should be. Though I remain skeptical, the young democratic candidate has offered ideas that are, to wit, too sound for sound bites. And yet, I notice the attacks on Obama that implicitly impugn his high level of education by suggesting that he is elitist. His critics essentially blast him for the kind of diploma and discursive power that has contributed to white hegemony for centuries. Perhaps the media is being manipulated to reveal the country’s basic anxiety about his race.
Indeed, instead of dialogue about 21st century problems, we are marred by an election in which some polling suggests racism—conscious or unconscious—will be the deal-breaker. The mainstream media’s out-of-touch approach to these issues can hinder attempts to overcome the problem. Media outlets reflect and project, to some degree, inept concepts of race that border on racism themselves—for instance, McCain being white and Obama being black, end of story. Much of this stuff still reaches the American public through their TV screens if not in print.
Before I cast my disgruntled vote this year, then, I’ll turn to a simple pacifier—William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”—not esoteric but simple, cataclysmic, and naive. It exploits paradox to outline moments of beauty and foreboding. Much like the contradictions at work in the election campaigns.
“A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage.” That’s the famous line, which cameoed in Silence of the Lambs. “A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.” That’s the most relevant one on Nov. 4. Rivaled closely by: “A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.”
It’s a state of mind one must return to—the natural-seeming contradiction of poetry—should one seek beauty in the barely navigable waves of daily “gotcha journalism” in an endless sea of vacuous politics.
Being a political junky is like having a cigarette addiction—we begin life innocent and pure, then repeatedly inject a foreign and addictive poisons into the body even though we all know they are ugly, suffocating, and enslaving. Then we retroactively tell ourselves that we can’t live without them, since we are brainwashed and addicted. Ah, where’s Blake when you need him?
“Joy and woe are woven fine / A clothing for the soul divine.”
As I finish writing this, Obama’s already polling better, thanks to the economy, and the MSM has more or less dropped the Bill Ayers issue. Still, my point of apprehension stands—in this day and age, anything can happen. To make it through election day, then, I have only one realistic source of Hope(©), an outlet to free the mind from the cigarette-like enslavement of news junkiness.
“To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”
When that November day comes, remember Blake and his innocence. It won’t help you choose for whom to vote, but it might help you find some peace of mind. Either way, it’s a maverick move.
The author is a Columbia College student studying philosophy and sociology. He is the Editor in Chief of The Columbia Daily Spectator.
