Because televised news has been rendered obsolete by technology (who needs Christine Amanpour when every citizen has an HD camera, YouTube, and Twitter?), I turned to the Internet to keep up with the events transpiring in Iran. I logged into Twitter and found this massive “Twitter-grid” of people in Iran and people around the world communicating. It went something like this….
#iranstudent:please help.they are attacking the dorms.
#crzygrl:EVERYONE WEAR GREEN TOMORROW TO WORK AND SCHOOL
#iranstudent:my god. where is help? they will kill us.
#Evlhaliburton:this is just like US in 2000.
#iranstudent: please send troops. they shot my friend.
#Evlhaliburton@iranstudent: i hope this isn’t just hype.
#crzygrl@Evlhaliburton:no way to tell. yeah, just like 2000 LOL. Go LAKERS!
#Evlhaliburton@crzygrl: LAKERS!
#iranstudent: we need help! please world help! where is Obama?
#Evlhaliburton: OBAMA! LAKERS!
I kid you not. That is almost verbatim.
The “net” generation lives in a bubble of entitlement and leftist ideology. No one is expecting people in their mid-20s to have all of the answers and make tough decisions. That is the period in your life for self-discovery, experimentation, and risk taking. As you age and settle into your 30s you start to develop heightened responsibility and your critical thinking skills fully take shape.
Yet, at some point, politics became “cool.” That’s great and all, and I encourage civic responsibility, but something has been lost along the way. Part of being politically active, either working to support a candidate or movement, or voting, is to be informed. It is your responsibility to educate yourself so you can make responsible, informed decisions.
The “net” generation naturally goes to the Internet for knowledge. Bad idea. Uninformed, tech savvy, indoctrinated young people spread information to other tech savvy, uninformed, indoctrinated young people. This information is treated as fact. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The left loves this. The entire Obama campaign was about this. A huge pool of uninformed, yet arrogant voters is what the left has been working to create for decades.
Politics is a highly intellectual, highly nuanced pursuit. YouTube some Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley clips and contrast that with the discussions on the Rachel Maddow show. Then really depress yourself and contrast Maddow with the trolls in the comments section on this website. Wanna be suicidal? Compare this website to the Huffington Post comments or Al Gore’s CurrentTV.
I laughed out loud when I read that both Tina Brown and Ann Coulter suggested that Sarah Palin “brush up” on her politics. It’s pretty much accepted wisdom that Sarah Palin needs to spend the next three years in the Political Science department at the University of Alaska. Roger Simon made the same point in the LA Times.
Seriously Dudes and Dudettes? That’s what she needs to do to win elections? Do you see who the nation just elected? Do you watch MSNBC? A lack of competent intellectual capacities is not a road block to the hallowed halls of power or media acceptance in today’s society.
Sarah Palin would win a landslide just being herself if she allowed me and John Ziegler produce a “reality show” that follows the Governor and her family around 24/7. Don’t air it on a news network but on TLC or BRAVO. Make it just as “real” as the other scripted reality shows out there. After one season Sarah Palin would have a substantial lead in any poll. After two seasons, people would be asking “Why can’t Sarah Palin be president NOW?”.
To win we must acknowledge that the field of battle radically changes the strategy. In a perfect world we would elevate the discourse. Move it back into the realm of William Buckley debating Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand grilling Phil Donahue. In this arena, a purely intellectual discussion, with collectivism challenging liberty; capitalist, free market ideology wins hands down.
The other option is to keep politics down in the mucky muck. Politics for the Hot Topic crowd. If we keep it there, we have to play by the rules set by the left. They pulled it down here so its on their terms. There is no “high road” in this world. People and personality trump ideas. I don’t think Reagan would have thought a Facebook page dignified enough for a president and I doubt Nixon would have been “tweeting” his peeps from his Blackberry, but for modern politicians it is essential.
Palin vs. Letterman is the first time in a long time that I saw conservatives properly use the media. Palin and her people played it perfectly, boxing not only Letterman but all of his supporters into a corner. The most rabid anti-Palinites were forced to make silly or offensive or silly and offensive comments that further discredited their position. Taking the high road or showing that we can “take a joke” would work if we weren’t in the mucky muck world. To allow ourselves to be the punch-line, reinforcing fallacious stereotypes and ignoring one sided political correctness is a bad plan.
Too often conservatives fight their battles on the wrong field. It’s disastrous to attempt to explain the “invisible hand of the free market” in a 140 character “tweet.” Conversely, nothing will be more embarrassing than a “bona fide” conservative trying to be cool by uploading MTV style videos to YouTube.
Either way, the debate would be better served if politics just stopped being cool. Real politics is about historical data, economic models, and fundamental principals. People, as they are in Iran right now, pay the price of political mistakes with their blood. It’s not a game. It’s not cool. I just don’t see that happening any time soon. But I can hope.
So kids, come on. Stop blogging about this and that. Stop tweeting your friends about political issues. Go play Warcraft or something. At least if you make the wrong call in a video game I don’t have to pay for it with my savings and people don’t have to pay for it with their lives. You screw up Warcraft and a couple of Orcs bite it. I can live with that.