Massaging Marshall's Message: Part II

 [Before I begin, I need to explain something. I am going into this subject in detail not only because it interests me but because I plan to get these thoughts published elsewhere as a full-length article. Therefore, I am—unapologetically—using you. You are my test audience, and I will appreciate any comments you have about the work.]

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Recapitulation

In the previous post we met Marshall McLuhan, the brilliant eccentric who proclaimed—somewhat enigmatically—“the medium is the message.” Here, in one of his more lucid statements on the subject, McLuhan elaborates on the concept:

[M]ost people … are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage—that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms [all of our perceptions]. The content ... of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of [electronic] information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by [everyone].

… You’ve got to remember that my definition [of medium] is broad; it includes any technology whatever that creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication. All technology has the property of the Midas touch; whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New technology is thus a revolutionizing agent. We see this today with the [electronic] media and we saw it several thousand years ago with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which was just as far-reaching an innovation—and had just as profound consequences for man. [From the Playboy interview cited in Part I; emphasis added.]

I quote this passage at length because it is the clearest explanation I have found in the guru’s own words of what the “McLuhan Equation” means. And that meaning is profound. Consider: new technology is a “revolutionizing agent,” and society is affected more by the medium than the content of the communication. Yet we are usually "blissfully ignorant" of what a new technology does to us because it “saturates every institution” of society. As a fish is unaware of the medium in which he swims, we may be unaware of the cultural effects of the mediums (technologies, revolutionizing agents) in which we are immersed. Two examples come to mind.

Effect on Politics

First, I have long been aware of the effects of new media on the political process. Throughout our 222-year history of constitutional democracy (the Constitution took effect on March 4, 1789) politics has been one steady stream of misinformation, innuendo, distortions, lies, and malevolent character assassination. The only things that have changed in nearly two and a quarter centuries are the techniques used: the mediums, to put it in McLuhanesque terms.

In the first contested presidential election (Adams-Jefferson, 1796) the parties could spread their sleazy charges and countercharges only by speeches or printed material. “Broadsides” (posters), pamphlets, and newspapers were the mass media of the day. Since then, three major developments we now take for granted changed society and the political process. These developments were:

1. the advent of commercial radio in the 1920s
2. broadcast television (and then cable and satellite TV) beginning in the 1940s
3. the invention of the Internet

Irrespective of the content of any given communication, politics changed as a result of each of these new technologies. Instead of reading pamphlets and newspapers, people got their political and other news via the radio, and later on TV. There were FDR’s “fireside chats” and presidential debates beginning with Nixon/Kennedy in 1960.* Today we use all those media—print and electronic—and overlay on them instant access through satellite connections and the Internet, thus creating a “24-hour news cycle” that saturates us all, as McLuhan predicted it would. The effects of these developments—their message, McLuhan would say—is that politicians seem more inclined to run to banks of microphones and make pronouncements for the benefit of their constituencies than to roll up their sleeves and do the public’s business.

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*McLuhan discusses the Nixon/Kennedy debate during an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. You can hear his comments at http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=fgv72SRHdUI&feature=related. He points out that Nixon “won” in the minds of those who listened on radio, but Kennedy came across better on TV. This is another example of the respective "messages" of radio and television.

 Sometimes openness and full disclosure are not such a good thing. We can tell that a labor/management negotiation is getting serious when the parties declare a news blackout and go behind closed doors to hammer out a deal. Would that Members of Congress did that sometimes! Turn off C-Span, close the Capitol Building to reporters, and spare us the details of the legislative sausage-making. Come back out when there is something substantive to announce. There is always time for posturing before the TV cameras after the bill is passed.

 

Effect on Society as a Whole

My second example, not entirely unrelated to the first, is the effect Internet applications such as Facebook and Twitter are having on society as a whole. Building on the old technologies mentioned above, these social media have helped us truly become a “Global Village.” (By the way, would you care to guess who coined that phrase? Yup! Marshall McLuhan.)

Tahrir Square, Cairo

The recent upheavals in the Middle East are the latest example. The fall of Mubarak in Egypt and uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, and other countries underscore the importance of the Internet. The content of the various Tweets and SMS text messages and Facebook postings is important, of course, but the “message” is the role these social media played.

 

As one commentator put it: “In the end, the real weapon is the power of networked communication itself. In previous revolutions it was the fax, or the pamphlet, or the cellphone — now it is SMS and Twitter and Facebook. Obviously none of these things cause revolutions, but to ignore or downplay their growing importance is also a mistake.” http://gigaom.com/2011/01/29/twitter-facebook-egypt-tunisia/

The Internet is the medium. Its message is the effect it had on the protesters’ ability to organize and spread the news. We no longer need traditional “media” to act as go-betweens for us. Anyone with a smart phone is a reporter now.

 

In Summary

A few days ago I posted “Philosturbation Most High,” a commentary that began with a mention of the movie Blowup but morphed into considering the effectiveness (or not) of certain kinds of highfalutin academic language. I followed that with Part I of “Massaging Marshall’s Message,” in which I mentioned Blowup again, moved on to Network, and started to explain Marshall McLuhan. Finally in this post we connect the dots, for all three of these entries are talking about the power of communication in our technological age and the effect technologies have on our perceptions and on society as a whole.

Blowup involves a photographer who may (or may not) have witnessed a murder and unwittingly captured it on film. It is a kind of cinematic trompe l’oeil in which nothing is quite what it seems and viewers are affected differently depending on how they interpret the various signs and symbols. In Network, a TV conglomerate uses a deranged anchorman’s ravings to increase their ratings, and then the need to maintain viewer share overwhelms every programming decision they make. What they pass off as “news” is actually entertainment, á là certain cable channels today. McLuhan probably loved both movies because they show that the mediums of photography and television bring their own messages into play, distinct from their actual content.

The technologies of radio, television and the Internet immerse us in a 24-hour news cycle. They envelope us with “too much information,” and we are lost in the deluge without being aware of it. Public policy debates are played out in a constant stream of sound bites, Tweets, and YouTube videos. Issues are reduced to what can be captured on a bumper sticker or in a 140-byte SMS text. Nuances are lost, and thoughtful discourse ceases. Politicians “play to the camera” or Tweet inanities instead of doing the jobs for which we elected them.

Lest I be accused of being a Luddite, let me say I welcome these technologies and the changes they bring. They may have been responsible in large part for enabling the overthrow of oppressive regimes in the Middle East, and they show virtually unlimited potential as our Global Village becomes more close-knit. My only concern is that we may not be fully aware of the hidden effects the technologies can have, whether for good or ill.

Foreshadowing Part III

I said in Part I that it would take “at least two posts” to finish these musings. I see that three is the magic number, so I will stop for now. Look for the next and final segment in a few days when I will comment on why we should remain aware that "the medium is the message.”

Massaging Marshall's Message: Part I

A few days ago I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's classic film Blowup (1966) which consciously addresses the fundamental problem of realism in the arts: the relationship between signs and their meaning. (See my post yesterday for some background.) 

I also saw another classic, Network, for the first time since it was released in 1976. Remember? "We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it any more!"

This double barrel movie experience brought to mind Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "The medium is the message." How strange but perceptive that man was! 

Bear with me; there is a wisp of logic connecting Blowup, Network, McLuhan, and us. But it will take at least two posts to connect the dots. In this first part, I lay a foundation on McLuhan himself and the meaning of the "McLuhan Equation."

 

Background

For those who don't know about McLuhan (1911-1980), he was a Canadian educator, philosopher, English lit professor, literary critic, rhetorician, and communications guru. He almost single-handedly created the field of media studies, and it is said that he predicted the World Wide Web a quarter century before it was invented. Like many brilliant men he was a little eccentric, from time to time exhibiting characteristics of either genius or lunacy, depending on one's point of view and whether one can decipher his arcane syntax and difficult writing/speaking style.

For example, the following is taken from an interview of McLuhan conducted by NBC newsman Edwin Newman, himself no slouch when it comes to language. McLuhan speaks in response to a question, and his answer has Newman befuddled, for obvious reasons:

Tribal man lives corporately, not privately, in a world of consciousness that includes everything we call subconscious; in the electric age the private man has been scrapped, corporate man is back, and at high speeds the private outlook of the private individual with his personal point of view is scrapped by virtue of the speed-up of electric information which goes totally around him. As electric man goes inside this resonating envelope of information, he joins this subconscious world that had previously been created by ages of private consciousness, and the gap between the private and the collective consciousness ends.

Now, for 100 bonus points, paraphrase what you just read in 25 words or less. (You can hear the hour-long interview, in six parts, beginning at http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Eq3sDgl9o. A few minutes of McLuhan speaking will be enough, I’m sure.)

In the intro to a lengthy interview published in Playboy in 1969, McLuhan’s style was described as follows:

McLuhan’s observations — “probes,” he prefers to call them — are riddled with such flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms as “The electric light is pure information” and “People don’t actually read newspapers, they get into them every morning like a hot bath.” Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.” (The full interview can be read at: http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/)

The medium influences society

The message is what it does to us

The Playboy interview asserts, “Despite his convoluted syntax, flashy metaphors and word-playful one-liners, ... McLuhan’s basic thesis is relatively simple.” That is true, but to understand the thesis fully, one must be clear on how McLuhan defines the key words of  his famous saying: 

• "medium"—any extension of ourselves; any agency, substance, tool or innovation through which we accomplish something.

• "message"—the underlying effect, lesson or moral that the medium brings to society.

For example, McLuhan considers a light bulb or an automobile to be a medium. Though neither a light bulb nor a car has content per se, McLuhan says each is full of message. In the case of the light bulb, the message is that we are not obliged to read by candlelight or oil lamp, and our workday can include the nighttime hours. In the case of the automobile, it is that we are freed from dependence on horses and trains and riverboats for our transportation. How the light bulb or automobile changed our environment is the moral of the story, the message to use McLuhan’s term.

At one point during the Newman interview McLuhan comments on the phenomenon of instant replay in football telecasts, a technology that was brand new at the time. He says, “Instant replay creates a totally new form of audience participation in the dynamics of the game; it freezes the action much like a painter or photographer does.”  

It's a perfect example of how the medium (instant replay) brought a message (changed viewer expectations) to society. If only McLuhan had lived to see how the Instant Replay Rule ("the previous play is under further review") has further changed the game and the role of the audience, he might have been amazed to see how prescient he was.

Or maybe not. One gets the feeling that McLuhan had few self-doubts and—just as he foresaw the Internet—was divinatory enough to foresee the day when referees and umpires would use TV replays to confirm or reverse their live-action decisions, thus vastly changing the games they officiate and the audiences who watch them.

Looking Ahead

Earlier I said to please bear with me. In Part II of my musings on this subject I will explain how Blowup, Network, McLuhan, and we are all connected, and how “the medium is the message” is affecting our lives in ways we often fail to see. In the meantime, check out some of these other materials on Marshall McLuhan.

Other Sources

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtycdRBAbXk&NR=1 (1:01, a dramatization that is a good place to start.)

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck&feature=fvw (a 4-minute montage giving a flavor for McLuhan’s style)

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF8jej3j5vA&feature=related (McLuhan on the Today Show discussing the Carter/Ford presidential debates)

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=fgv72SRHdUI&feature=related (McLuhan on Dick Cavett discussing the Nixon/Kennedy debate)

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g&feature=related (a 2:16 clip summarizing McLuhan’s viewpoint. Be sure to change video quality to 240p on the control bar below the video screen for the sound to work.)

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=x6eJyth8Dvo&feature=related (a 2:34 video example of the "message" carried by various mediums, including The Simpsons. Think of how each of these examples has changed how we interact with each other, how we view events, and how we perceive “news” compared to the pre-television days, for example.)

Philosturbation Most High

I watched the classic film Blowup (1966) yesterday and did some reading about its many layers and deep meanings. In one article I read the following from Peter Goldman, an English professor in Salt Lake City:

Antonioni [the film's writer/director] suggests that meaning is discovered in the creative process rather than being determined by a preformed authorial intentionality. The mimesis of empirical reality is subordinated to a collaborative process involving the audience and actors. Modernism follows realism in questioning the role of the artist as the origin of meaning, reflecting the larger problem of cultural authority in market society. [Eric] Gans [a professor at UCLA] comments,

The realist esthetic includes for the first time a critical model of its implied audience, whose situation with respect to the scene of representation it attempts to redefine . . . . The esthetic experience of the work becomes a critique of universal cultural assumptions such as the mediating narrator or the formal self-substantiality of the painted universe.

WTF? Really? Can anyone translate this gibberish into something intelligible?

This is a perfect example of why philosophers and ethicists--even lawyers and physicians--so often cannot communicate effectively with anyone but each other. They use terminology (jargon, cant) so peculiar that it is understood only by the members of the particular discipline. It is totally obscure to the general population and even to well-educated professionals from other fields.

I suppose I should admit the rather distinct possibility (read: certainty) that I am not of the intended audience. Goldman's work was an academic paper for Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology. It seems that "generative anthropology" has something to do with the theory that human culture is a genetic (generative) process that stems entirely from the development of signs and language. (By the way, Professor Gans, whom Goldman quotes, created the field and founded and edits the journal mentioned above.)

Whatever. If Goldman's and Gans' syntax is any indication of our language-based genetic progress, we've a long way to go.

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An added note: 
This post will tie in nicely to something I'm working on that involves Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message," and the current state of political discourse. So, as they say, "Watch This Space."

The True Properties of Time

I don't care what Einstein said, there are just two important properties of time that we need to know about:

    1. Time speeds up as we get older; and
    2. Everything takes twice as long as you think it will, even if you count on it taking twice as long as you  think it will.

Allow me to elucidate. First, time does not actually speed up, of course; it only seems to. Each day, week or year is a smaller percentage of your life than the one before it. When you were ten, 10% of your life had to pass before you reached your next birthday. When you're 50, only 2% has to do so, thus the year seems to go by more quickly. I asked my friend Tadd how he would explain the phenomenon. I didn't tell him my answer, but his was virtually the same. He thought in terms of trips around the sun: the more orbits you've completed, the less significant each additional one seems (mathematically, at least). So by virtue of this independent, unbiased confirrmation, Tadd's and my hypothesis is at least a scientific law, and I'm sticking to it.

The second force is akin to Parkinson's Law, which states: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." But I think the ETTAL principle ("everything takes twice as long") rises to an even higher level: that of scientific theory.  A scientific theory is a statement that explains a group of observations or phenomena, including hypotheses and laws, and accounts for a wider variety of events. Broad acceptance of a theory comes when it has been tested repeatedly on new data and has been used to make accurate predictions. In some cases, such as the germ theory of infectious disease, a theory becomes so completely accepted that it stops being referred to as a theory and is just taken as a plain and simple fact.

I have been testing ETTAL for many decades and have always found it to be true. No matter how well I plan, everything takes longer than it should; roughly twice as long, in fact. I think it fair to say, without equivocation or peradventure, that ETTAL has finally risen to the level of scientific fact.

For example, just a few days ago I bought a new filing cabinet. I was tired of my black, metal, two-drawer version that always wanted to tip forward if I fully extended the top drawer. At Office Depot I found a handsome lateral file in a dark cherry finish at a good price. There was "some assembly required," of course, but that's not a big deal. Or so I thought.

My first mistake was trying to read the instructions. I should have just looked at the pictures; instructions slow you down. The second problem was that I didn't close the door to my office to keep the cats out. Those of you who have cats know that anything new attracts them faster than catnip. They wanted to be in the empty box. They wanted play cat hockey with screws and other bits and pieces. They wanted to get inside the old cabinet when I removed the drawers. With their help, assembling the thing took most of the afternoon. Once I got it together there was the question of where to put it. The planned location wasn't as convenient as I had thought it would be, so I had to rearrange the furniture, which meant I also had to deal with computer cables, etc.

When I got everything in place, there was the matter of the files themselves. Obviously I couldn't just take the old files and drop them into the new drawers. Certainly not. The new cabinet is build for hanging files, so I have to make new folders for each subject and new labels and plastic tabs for each folder. As I was doing that, I decided to riffle through each file and weed out old material and duplicates. This was time consuming in itself, but as the pile of discarded papers grew I needed two trips to the recylcle bins and even some time to burn sensitive material in the fireplace (because my shredder got lost in the move from Baton Rouge).

Well, I finally got it done and I'm patting myself on the back. I was able to "reduce, reuse and recycle" and learn a little something about the theory of relativity.

The end result, with WhoDat asleep on my chair.

Close-up of the new piece.

During this project I came across some worthwhile things I'd totally forgotten about, which brings me to one more force at work in our lives. Not only does time speed up, and not only do things take longer, but we start thinking about the hereafter, as in:  I walk into a room and ask myself, "What am I here after?" [Ba-dum-bum!]

Apropos of that thought, I leave you with this wonderful little number in which award-winning cabaret singer Pam Peterson sings a great parody about the challenges of an aging memory. Check this out, it's a hoot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzSaoN2LdfU

Stuart

Ice

Ice everywhere. Ice on the Chattahoochee where it flows from Coon Den Ridge;  ice on Lake Lanier;  ice down river at the Roswell Mill and Jones Bridge and on down toward Columbus. Ice on the State Capitol and on the freeways and on the side streets. Ice on the power lines and the trees, weighing them down, stopping traffic and chilling the spirits of the people. Ice blanketing cities and towns and countryside and covering the dome of Stone Mountain where Davis and Lee and Jackson peer into a nether sky as gray as sharks.

Seldom has there come ice so thick, seldom has there come cold so biting, to keep company this genteel Southern city that knows not how to cope.

The ice perdures.

And nothing moves.

Keeping Perspective

In some emails to family and friends I portrayed the recent Atlanta snowstorm as a big deal, and in fact it was pretty unusual. They don't get snow here every year, our white Christmas last month was the first since 1882, and the total annual snowfall is only 2.5" on average. So when more than that was predicted for Sunday night into Monday morning, people went nuts. Grocery stores sold out of bread and milk. Hardware and home improvement stores ran low on salt, shovels, and sleds. Liquor sales were up, naturally.

All eleven [!] of the area's snow plows hit the roads, but of course they couldn't cover thousands of miles of streets, and the next afternoon the snow changed to freezing rain. Mind you, this isn't pool-table-flat Kansas or Indiana or Florida. This is Atlanta -- there are real hills here because there are actual mountains in the next county. So when you combine the topography with snow, ice, and a few million people who don't know how to drive in these conditions, it creates a very interesting scene indeed.

As I probably would have done had I been in their shoes, my friends up north used the occasion to make fun of us. We're weather wimps, they said. We need to stop com- plaining, they said. Look at Boston getting dumped on with a couple feet of snow today [Jan. 12]. Did you see what New York City went through three weeks ago? Buffalo and Syracuse get this all the time, and you don't hear them whining, they said. 

They're right, of course ... but, although I nobly suffered the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune -- not to mention my friends' disparaging remarks -- I also chose to reflect on the lessons one can learn from the situation.

 Keeping perspective is one of them. In the larger reality, this is no big deal. When I lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois -- on the shores of Lake Michigan and closer to Wisconsin than Chicago's Loop -- I didn't think much of driving to work in six or eight inches of snow with the temperature below zero. One week I lived there the high temperature the entire week was eight below! Yeah, it was pretty miserable, but you learn to deal with it. This week in Atlanta I just put on a sweater and "bundled in," as dey say in Nordakota.

The other lesson to take away from this little winter vignette is patience. In a few days nature will remove the snow and ice and we'll be back to normal, which in January is in the 40s for a daytime high.

So I'm being patient and reminding myself to keep perspective. After all, I could be in Fargo, dontcha' know.

New Year's Resolution

Jan. 2, 2011
On New Years Eve my friend Bob sent me an e-mail that was too long to post in the comment box. It relates to some of my viewpoints, and he's given me permission to reprint his message as a kind of "guest editorial." Here's what Bob wrote--

from    b******@*********.com
to      Stuart Showalter
date    Fri., Dec. 31, 2010 at 8:21 PM
subj    New Year's Resolution

Stuart,
Like you, I get really frustrated with people who blindly believe whatever they hear or read. Your blog's theme is "question everything and beware of answers," but a lot of people don't seem to question anything. They think they have all the answers already, or they assume that because it was said on cable news or a friend of a friend sent something to them by email, it really is true. These simpletons aren't thinking, and they mock anyone who shows signs of being intellectual. They ridicule experts, and complain of "spineless, elites with Ivy League educations and fat resumes that aren't based on hard work and free enterprise." (Sarah Palin actually said that on Fox News on Nov. 11, 2009.) And they're too dumb to realize that behind their backs they're being ridiculed by people who actually use their minds to think. It's the dumbing-down of America, you betcha!

These people are paranoid about the government. They've been brainwashed into thinking that Reagan was right when he said "government's not the solution, it's the problem" or however he said it, words to that effect. But if government is the problem, why do people accept their military retirement, GI Bill, Medicare and VA benefits? Do they not cash their Social Security checks? Why do they want better mail service and want it six days a week? What would we do without fire, police and EMT services? What about food and drug safety? National defense and homeland security? The state and federal court systems? National Weather Service, NASA and NOAA? National Institutes of Health and the CDC?  There are hundreds of valuable government programs at all levels, but the right wing zealots only want to cut programs and cut taxes and do away with practically everything except fighting wars and delivering the mail, and they'd probably like to privatize those things too.

I've got news for the Tea Partiers and libertarians of the world -- big government isn't bad; bad government is bad, no matter how big or small. Look at corruption in small town governments. Look at the history of cities like Chicago and Newark and LA. But the right wing crazies think smaller is better. Well it ain't necessarily so. And another thing, they're addicted to cutesy sayings and sound bites. Their insight doesn't extend any deeper than a phrase that would fit on a bumper sticker. Phrases like "How's that hope-y, change-y stuff workin' out for ya?" and "A nation of sheep creates a government of wolves" and "I want my country back." These are just substitutes for real thinking.

The angry airheads are addicted to simplistic mottos and simplistic answers. Term limits, for example. Term limits will solve everything! If we keep politicians from lingering in Washington or the state capital or city hall, we'll get back to what the Founding Fathers envisioned: "citizen legislators." Voila! Problem solved! But what the sound-bite crowd doesn't realize is that there are unintended consequences for every "simple" solution. For one thing, a politician who gets term-limited is just beginning to learn how to do the job, so he or she gets replaced by another neophyte. The one who leaves usually moves up to a higher office or becomes a lobbyist. This would mean that lobbyists will have even more power than ever if all the politicians are newbies. The issues are too complicated for amateurs, but that's what you'd have if term limits were in effect. Is that what we want?

And another problem: term limits are undemocratic. If the majority want an elected official to stay for a third or fourth or tenth term in office, wouldn't it be undemocratic to throw them out? You betcha! How's that will-of-the-majority thing workin' out for ya?

I'm going to stop now. This crap gets me too worked up. I'm going to adopt a New Year's resolution and tune out all politics for the year.

All the best for 2011,
Bob
P.S. Thank God it's not an election year!
_______

As you see, Bob does not suffer fools lightly. I can appreciate how he feels; I understand his frustration. I agree with most of it, if not perhaps how he worded it because he verges on anger, and anger is not an argument. Only logic will do. The problem is that logic seems to be out of fashion.Like Bob, I get really frustrated with people whose opinions are based on rumor, myth and hysteria. People like the "birthers," and the people who believed the lies about there being "death panels" in the health reform law. People like the superpatriot pictured here who want to "take the country back," but to where they aren't clear.

These folks' minds are made up, and they have no regard for facts and logic. (See my blogs back in October: "Opinions Are Not Facts" parts 1 and 2.)

Bob has a great idea, and I'm going to join him in making a New Year's resolution.

I, J. Stuart Showalter, hereby resolve --

• to tune out Sarah Palin, Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, etc. for 2011;
• to "de-friend" people on Facebook whose blather irritates me;
• to pay no attention to "Cluster Fox"; and
• to ignore the crying jags and noisy political BS of John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, etc.

I can't take it any more, and I refuse to let it continue to upset me. I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but I thank Bob for the idea.

[By the way, Bob is not on any distribution list of mine, so don't bother going back to old emails to figure out who he is.]