The late Texan journalist Molly Ivins once wrote that “the truth, that slippery bugger, has the oddest habit of being way the hell off to one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view.”
“It’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, “Cat,” and the other side saying “Dog,” while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes,” Ivins observed.
Consider this bipolar paragraph fronting a recent CBC report on the Freedom Convoy Inquiry in Ottawa:
Downtown Ottawa in late January and much of February 2022 was either a peace-fuelled hug fest so beautiful to behold that it still induces tears, or a dangerous cauldron of hate and aggression that made life hell for the 18,000 or so people who call the city centre home. It truly was a matter of perspective.
It’s a purring cat! No, it’s a rabid dog! Waitaminnit…what if the source issue actually involves a rogue elephant with enormous tusks: the two years of crippling lockdown and vaccine mandate measures that trashed businesses, divided friends and families, damaged mental and physical health, and inspired a nation-wide protest by front-line workers on wheels?
Nah, that can’t be it.
I usually drive around with an iPod in my car, so I can avoid the radio in general and our public broadcaster in particular. One day I forgot my device and reached for the dial for distraction. The first thing I heard was from a reporter commenting on the Fredom Convoy Inquiry - words so surprising I pulled over to the side of the road to jot them down:
“I want to know what the heck was this thing all about. Was it some new form of hybrid rebellion?”
You don’t get to be a CBC reporter by being this clueless. This woman - whose name I didn’t catch - knew perfectly well that the Freedom Convoy involved protesting the vaccine mandates and COVID restrictions. And nothing but. The truckers themselves said this to the press over and over.
This kind of feigned stupidity acts as a form of historical revisionism, through wordy witlessness.
It’s the same kind of performative ignorance embraced in the recent Atlantic piece, “Let’s Call a Pandemic Amnesty.” The thesis of Brown University economics professor Emily Oster is that “we didn’t know,” and as a result of understandable confusion about the science on masking and mandates it’s time to forgive each other and move on.
Whether Oster is sincerely addled or not, it appears the best way for the managerial class to skirt Dumbo is to play dumb. A prize example is Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade’s interview earlier this year with entrepreneur Steve Kirsch:
Brian Kilmeade:
You did your own research. What did you find was effective and what was the reaction when you put it out there?
Steve Kirsch:
Well what I found was that hundreds of thousands of Americans had been killed by this vaccine and millions have been injured. And clearly you were more likely to be injured or dead from the vaccine than if you were un- [censor edit] - saying, and what the reality is, is completely the opposite. There's a conservative radio show commentator, his name is Wayne Root. He had a wedding eight months ago. And he had about half conservatives and - they're all pretty much conservatives, OK? But half were vaccinated and half were not vaccinated and he found that, of the hundred people that were vaccinated, he had twenty-six people who were seriously injured. And he had seven people who died. And in the unvaccinated group he had zero and zero. That is statistically impossible if the vaccines are safe.
Brian Kilmeade: So you know we can't verify those numbers, these are numbers that you have…
Of course, Kilmeade and his colleagues could have easily investigated these claimed numbers, by tracking down Kirsch’s sources. But there be dragons…or rather, elephants.
The Sage of Massachusetts
Years ago, MIT media critic Noam Chomsky insisted the “smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...”
This quote on media misdirection pairs perfectly with Ivin’s dog-cat-elephant analogy.
In October of 2020, Chomsky told The New Yorker that Donald Trump is “the worst criminal in human history.” Yet less than two years later the Sage of Massachusetts was insisting that Trump was the “one statesman” speaking sensibly about negotiating an agreement with Russia to end the conflict in the Ukraine. The man Chomsky defined as worse than Hitler.
That shows range.
The most charitable interpretation of this jarring inconsistency is that the 92 year-old MIT prof is no longer the intellectual lion of the past. More worryingly, there’s his statement the same month endorsing the isolation of the unvaccinated from the rest of society “for their own good.” How do they get their groceries? Their ability to get a hold of food in isolation “was their problem,” Chomsky told the interviewer.
Alas, the grizzled Chomsky, beloved by the liberal left and their portals in the legacy and alternative media, is now himself an icon of the limited debate spectrum he once decried. The prof who co-authored the seminal media study Manufacturing Consent now manufactures contempt for contrarians.
Yet I doubt this can be put down solely to old age, considering Chomsky’s arc from elephant spotter to elephant denier is shared by the vast majority of his respectable colleagues on the far left.
Sure, some of Chomsky’s colleagues and fans may argue for a “pandemic amnesty” after getting a hold a part of the beast and pronouncing it “sharp like a stick,” “flat like a pancake,” or “thick like a stump.” Yet they remain resolutely unfeeling and safely blind to the elephantine outline, like the adults on Sesame Street who keep failing to see Snuffleupagus.
Is it any wonder that a recent poll found that nearly 60 percent of all registered American voters see the mainstream media as a threat to democracy?
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”
― Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Great read. I’m still astounded by Chomsky’s statements RE: unvaccinated during the Covid debacle.
I'm remembering why I always looked forward to your stuff in the Vancouver Courier.