Overwhelmed by the Magnitude

Discussion in my head:

Re: James Bamford's article on The Rendon Group:

So, how the hell are we supposed to know what is the truth and what is opinion?

Truth must then be a fluid thing. "Simply one's last mood," as Oscar says.

Yes, Kate, it always has been like this. And it will be like this in the future -- information is power over everything. It's just becoming more pervasive, because things have been sped up so drastically.

[Update, 11/30: The Rendon group is apparently not an isolated case. See LATimes frontpager on the Lincoln Group.] [jesus. h. christ. -ed. amen, brother. -k. ]

[Update 12/1: This shit is bananas. Even "fiction" is serving political purposes. Although this time it's big pharma who is behind it.]

"The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide. That is a comparatively small part of the whole field of human interest."

- From Chapter 24, "News, Truth, and a Conclusion."

Note to self: re-read Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. That book is true. (Internet readers can find it here.)

"The bewildering variety of our impressions, even after they have been censored in all kinds of ways, tends to force us to adopt the greater economy of the allegory. So great is the multitude of things that we cannot keep them vividly in mind. Usually, then, we name them, and let the name stand for the whole impression. But a name is porous. Old meanings slip out and new ones slip in, and the attempt to retain the full meaning of the name is almost as fatiguing as trying to recall the original impressions. Yet names are a poor currency for thought. They are too empty, too abstract, too inhuman. And so we begin to see the name through some personal stereotype, to read into it, finally to see in it the incarnation of some human quality.

...When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays, moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted. We cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not see. Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore, they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture. Thus the abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated. Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about. Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words and names and gray theory. Being artists of a sort we paint pictures, stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

Or, if possible, we find gifted men who can visualize for us. For people are not all endowed to the same degree with the pictorial faculty."

-From Chapter 11, "The Enlisting of Interest", 1922.

1922!!

So, what the hell do we do about this?

Posted: Sunday - November 27, 2005 at 03:31 PM |