The poverty of explanation

THE POVERTY OF EXPLANATION (expanded version)

I listen to many hours of "news" on various television stations, especially MSNBC, and quickly realize the visual components of how content (subject matter or topics) is treated is as important as sound elements.  How questions and opinions are presented in the name of informing the public deeply affects what we believe and what use as guides for choices in our daily lives.  Who performs the analysis of content is crucial, because I listen more carefully to anchor persons who suggest they are reasonably serious and "objective" than to those who betray themselves  with body language and voices, with sly grins, choked laughter, and dramatized emotion.

Give special notice to the word "suggest" as I use it above, because role-playing and performance are dominant in 21st- century speech acts, assisted by the complexities of social media.  Perhaps communication as always been theatrical or dramatic in terms of its rhetorical components, even in our most intimate moments of talking to one another.  We are governed by subjectivity and uncertainty. Emotion and ideology cannot be excluded from efforts to deliver the news, of course, any more than delivery can be clearly separated from interpretation and judgment.  Acts of human communication comprise quilted or knotted parts.

At present, we can depend very little on cultural literacy among American citizens to support common understanding of public topics.  Our remoteness from shared values about Americanness ensures that we readily misunderstand American rhetoric, how verbal and visual gestures seek to persuade.  We listen to thousands of words about color-coded nationalism and bogus myths regarding power and Darwinian superiority; about the swamp of politics and the cesspools of fear, hatred, and mutual distrust; shithouse countries and sub-human immigrants; gaps between the wealthy and the poor;  the criminal inequity of social justice, remediation of mental health issues, and punishment for greater and lesser violations of an abstract rule of law; rampant violence and terrorism domestic and international. Donald Trump is a far better actor than Ronald Reagan was, because his talking and tweeting ensures that no one can know for sure  the dancer from the dance.  One could, to some degree, discern a difference between Reagan the second-rate Hollywood actor and Reagan the American president.  Such is not the case with Trump as he panders to his base, his anger-infested tribe. He is an ultimate Shakespearean tragedy. He expertly applies lessons from a playbook co-authored by Machiavelli and Hitler like a negative John the Baptist forecasting the Revelation of St. John the Divine.

 In the case of Trump, it  is doubtful that we actually know what our ears are hearing or what our eyes are reading. And in the commerce of the "news," it is noteworthy that a certain kind of explanation is missing regarding Trump as an overly exposed object for analysis:  why among all the experts that MSNBC and other stations  give air time on legality, race, national security and intelligence-gathering,  health crises, sexuality,  ecology and climate change do we never hear testimony from a few people who have verifiable  expertise in sociolinguistics and the psychology of language?

Is well-informed or scholarly explanation about the psychology and  impact of language usage too advanced for presentation to ordinary watchers of television?  Would such explanation be characterized as an act of treason? Who makes decisions about who has agency to explain?  Do those who call the shots about what is to be seen and heard on news programs have sinister motives for limiting the breadth of explanation by excluding the findings of linguistics?  Are they held hostage by lobbies?  Do they have any legitimate reasons for making the televised news a kind of Platonic cave for the American public?  Do domestic and foreign cartels , using all the resources of digital technologies, have a vested interest in keeping the American public virtually confused and dumb?  I watch. I wonder. I worry.

I wonder if in-depth explanation about the functions of language constitutes a threat  to national security and love of country.  I worry that commerce in racialized, anti-human stereotypes might be the centerpiece and hub for American futures.  An accidental trinity of Karl Marx, Carl Jung, and Karl Popper provides some hate-group  clues about the poverty of explanation which characterizes and undermines the truth-value of  the televised "news."  I watch the birthing of American  Armageddon.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 10, 2019