The Trouble with Norman Solomon

Something happened to remind me of this this morning, so I thought I would comment on it. Norman Solomon is a media critic, who has the occasional good comment about how the media distorts news. I first encountered him in a little book called, "The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh."



Norman Solomon's thesis seems to be this; because Dilbert doesn't encourage the overthrow of the capitalist system, it is actually hurting those that read it.

Take your average Joe cubicle. He opens the comics page and reads about the antics of Dilbert and Wally and so on, and laughs. It brings a little levity to his day, making him feel a bit better about his life. And that's the danger. You see a happy worker is less likely to rise up and smash the system and install the socialist paradise.

His other complaint is about how Dilbert enjoys being an engineer. Dilbert, presumably, went to school and studied and became an engineer, and got a job working as an engineer. He likes being an engineer, and invents stuff in his own time. But the problems in his work are caused by things that stop him from doing what he likes, which is engineering. At his corporation he has all sorts of distractions that keep him from working, like co-workers, idiot bosses, and unnecessary meetings. You see the problem, don't you?

An efficient engineer is exactly what those jerks in the upper management of our large corporations would want. Dilbert is playing right into their hands.

This is the moral bankruptness of some on the left - they want Capitalism to fail, and they want workers to be miserable. It's the only way they can build up the energy needed to remake society in their image. While I do favor leftist policies on many issues, more than that I want capitalism to be successful for all Americans. Capitalism is, by far, the best system we have. Wishing for it's failure, and wishing for the suffering of your fellow Americans, well its just beyond the pale.

Check back later as I might post some pictures relating to this issue.

The Good Old Days

Once upon a time, Man created Art, Literature, Philosophy and Criticism. These were wonderfully precious gifts and they remained the province of the few with the wit or talent to appreciate them. Most people were born and lived and died without Literature, Philosophy and Criticism. Most people couldn't read, and although they had some crafts and storys they created for their communities, the world of "higher" ideas was forever closed off to them.

Then an inventor and printer named Gutenburg commited an evil travesty. He invented a device that allowed dozens of copies of books to be printed and spread among the peoples of the world. Those noble protectors of literature and "higher" thought, the upper classes, did their best to prevent these words from drifting out into the society at large. Unfortunately, they failed. It turned out that people had a desire for information and ideas and stories that books could fulfill. And with the invention of the Printing Press, and the invisible hand of capitalism, many printers began printing books for the masses to read.

Oh what a hew and cry went up among the "cultured" classes. Reading in The Century, December 1885, one finds this passage, directed to Sunday School Librarians.

"If the books which they find in these libraries are, as a rule, silly and shallow fictions, their intellectual tastes may be so depraved by their reading, that they will become visionary and restless creatures, wholly unfit for the serious business of life. That a book should be hurtful to young readers, it is not necessary that it should teach bad morals; the mischief is done quite as effectually by an overwrought sentimentalism as by a lax morality. . . . The trashy fiction still disseminated through them is sufficient to addle unnumbered brains and injure unnumbered lives."

But America didn't heed this warning or the countless others like it--bringing us down to the present day, a truely deplorably time when there are dozens of "popular" mediums, dedicated to finding as many participants as possible. These include Movies, Music, Books, Television, the Internet, and so on. Unlike in the golden ages of mankind, there isn't a specific class of people who decides what is proper and what is improper for viewing or reading. The critics still exist, but they largely serve no purpose. If only they still served their valuable purpose of telling people what to think. If there was a class of people set aside that could read the literature and news and ideas and tell us what was good and what was bad and what was true and what was false, well think how wonderful life would be.

Norman Solomon, a critic who has had the misfortune to be born in modern times makes a simlar lament in his latest column, a review of the year 2002. He comments, "A culture accustomed to finding substantial meaning in TV commercials and an array of phony prime-time shows is unlikely to rouse itself to human connection and moral action when the nation's powers-that-be decide on yet another war."

All joking aside, Solomon does make the standard and correct point that it's troubling to have so much of our media controlled by large corporate oligarchies--but I still remain convinced that the truth is available to all who want to see it. And that in a free society, you are going to find people who look at exactly the same information as you do and come up with different conclusions.

The Wisdom of Solomon

It was kind of a slow week, and then all of a sudden we got several good articles. So several updates today. Probably.

First came across Norman Solomon through his book “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh.” In it he takes Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) for not writing cartoons that expose the horrors of large corporation capitalism. He also argues that by providing a safety valve for workplace anger, Scott Adams prevents the workers from getting mad enough to organize and change the system.

One of the ways you can tell an ideologue is that he is satisfied with the suffering of others if he believes it will lead to the changes he’s advocating. Norman Solomon wants to see capitalism over thrown, and as such is unhappy when management gives the workers some of the things they demand. He’d rather the workers suffer so that they will get angry enough to completely destroy the system.

Such thinking is not unique to the left. Certainly there are right commentators who take pleasure in the problems of California, which they attribute to Liberal Politicians.

Solomon’s latest article is a portrait of the future 50 years hence, in which there is only one media company (with the catchy name AT WONDERS), and the air is so bad that you have to wear a gas mask outside. Cheery. Of course in the future we’ll all have giant domes so the gas mask scenario isn’t really the future.

Solomon’s critiques of media are pretty much always old school, and ignore the internet. There are a lot of metaphors for the internet. Here’s one. It’s an infinite frontier. It’s being colonized. There are large ranches and small farms and tiny vegetable garden’s (like the site you are currently viewing.) Most people still get their news from Mainstream sources perhaps, but the numbers shrink ever year.

Now the Internet isn’t the best counter to the mainstream media. As I document pretty regularly, there are hundreds of different points of view online, all with “facts” backing them up. I personally like that. I like that I can visit websites of all different political factions and ideals.

But remember rule #1, which I haven’t mentioned yet, but is true. Ideologues hate democracy. You see the internet allows points of views from most American’s, and probably eventually all Americans. But if points of views are available everywhere, doesn’t that devalue the value of any one point of view? If an Ideology points the One True Path to ideology, than why have other points of view? Tough question. Because it’s clear on many issues that there is one right answer, and differing points of views don’t seem to add much value.

Still I believe in noisy boisterous and occasionally angry democracy.

Still to come, an analysis of Michelle Malkin’s “A Generation of Skanks” and Your Weekly Rush. Come on back.