The Ideology Disease

I told a friend that I had a sore throat. My friend said, “You know you have an over-active imagination. You just think you have a sore throat.” Case in point.

Speaking, speech, verbal communication, is a symbolic act, a balancing act using symbols, phonemes and words made of 26 letters. Symbols that “stand for” something real but are not in themselves “real”. Words and sounds represent something tangible “out there”. So it is possible to have a verbally ordered world outside the “real” world ordered by some other rules and laws outside the verbally ordered world, an intangible, insubstantial, elusive world that rests on a belief of the speaker/writer. And the speaker/writer can spread that belief to millions of others like a plague, a pandemic of belief that others try to make real. If that belief is that a certain people are inferior and the speaker’s people are super-human then we can have a holocaust. If we have a leader who says that another national leader has the weapons to start a “nucular” war, and that we should start a preemptive war to nip the other leader in the bud, then that would be worth all the blood and treasure it costs us because we surely do not want a “nuculer” war. That describes an ideology where saying something makes it so. That describes a disease of communication and a diseased speaker who has infected a whole society.

So we need a doctor specializing in the disease of ideology , the ideology doctor. If you suspect you have a run-of-the-mill disease, you go to a doctor. What does a doctor do? Questions all the symptoms and runs tests before prescribing any remedy. What if the diseased person prescribes the remedy? Then that person has an eight cylinder fooooooool for a doctor. Does the ideology doctor use the analogy of the medical doctor? Oh, yeah. Question for symptoms and run tests that will ascertain the “facts” before moving on. Question authority. Discuss and debate the choices for policy (prescription).

Where were the reporters, the fourth estate? Where was the Supreme Court? Where were the legislators? Where were they all when this diseased, self-styled “decider-in-chief” (dictator-wannabe) was running rampant like “Chicken Little” with his (as it turned out, after the fact) diseased message? Which segment of our society was so easily misled to fall in, big time, with the ideology-infected chief-decider? What gave him his charismatic effect on that sad segment?

Every citizen of a democratic society has the obligation to become an ideology doctor, to test the symptoms of leadership, diagnose claims of leadership, and prescribe the person who best represents the cure for the issues of policy needed by the body politic.

Please, nation, don’t ever get this disease of ideology again. We should be immune for a little while, especially in the next election cycle, but when the disease-induced immunity wears off, please become able to effect the cure as a preventative medicine in future. And will all those who were AWOL (absent without leave) and complicit in this sad epidemic, stand by at your prescribed duty post and avoid being suspect of dereliction of duty.

Voting Against Your Own Best Interests Because You Were Seduced by Irrelevancies

Mark these words by JIM WEBB, the Democratic senator from Virginia, concerning the coming CLASS STRUGGLE IN THIS COUNTRY. What he said before the 2006 election. Read the full text by clicking the post in the column on the right. DO NOT CLICK if you want to have a nice day undisturbed by serious thinking.

Here is a sample:

“The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of “God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag” while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet.”

What he says is sickening to anyone who is not one to act like a fat cat.

Democrat Candidates Debate 11-16-07

WHAT A SORRY MESS!

Whoever organized the Democrat Party candidates’ debates knows absolutely nothing about debate. And “organized” is not the operative word. From the start, the “journalist” had a tiger by the tail and failed miserably ever after to achieve organization and fair and direct clashes on the issues. WHO ANOINTED THE JOURNALISTS AS THE BEST PEOPLE TO MODERATE A DEBATE???!!!  A systematic rotation for fair and balanced participation was totally missing. Time control was absolutely missing. Questioning is a journalist’s device and even that was not well done. That’s all journalists know. Debate goes beyond questions to the proper statement of resolutions. RESOLUTIONS are debated! Resolved, that global warming is man-made. Resolved, that global warming can be alleviated by government policy. There are debate experts who could and should be called upon to ORGANIZE proper debates that provide direct clashes on the most important propositions that we face. It would have been better to have the candidates proceed the way a pick-up game of basketball proceeds, where the players referee themselves according to the rules of the game everyone knows. Then we would have seen the true character of the candidates emerge in discussion behavior, which requires respect for fellow participants, their rightful time and position. Only once did I hear a candidate take exception to the journalist’s rule; they should have protested that there are no “yes” or “no” answers to difficult questions, and insisting on such simple answers educates no one. Foolish journalistic tactics! The participants should have dominated the “journalist”, whose voice gave an interstellar static as he sputtered in the background to control the time. The candidates should have stepped up to their responsibility for the process. The next president of the United States may have been standing on that stage and should have been more presidential, the chief presiding officer of our government. What do journalists know about presiding? As moderators they are not very good at all.