Who is telling the truth?

marshall mcluhanWho is telling the truth?

Except for the liars, everyone is.

Unfortunately, we all view history through the lens of our own upbringing. An ever-changing kaleidoscope of world events refracts the “truth” into a thousand prisms. We each eventually pick a point of view of the world which is most pleasing, or least terrifying, to ourselves. That view is focused and shaped by what we see and read daily.

Saul Bellow once said about the media, “nobody will be heard, who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth”. Bill Moyers recently reflected that news people need to speak in “bumper sticker” snippets to hold our attention. Media mavens have seven seconds to grab us and make an impression before we are “gone” and on to something else mentally.

It would be simple arithmetic to hold the media responsible for our loss of depth perception. But that would be wrong. We are conditioned to accept specially crafted sound bytes. Marshall McLuhan, back in the 70’s, wrote a blockbuster book exposing the medium as the message. People have always had a tendency to view what they read as “truth, so help me God”. Today people view what they see as the “truth”. But as the written word is just a sound byte, the video is just an action byte, and only as real as we perceive it to be.

Here is a case in point. The Bush administration focused our attention on terrorism after 9/11 and in true Barnum and Bailey sleight of hand switched our focus to Iraq. Although one had nothing to do with the other, we followed the sound bytes and believed the video clips, and “agreed” Iraq needed to be punished. Most recently, a concerted military effort has been made to link the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq to Iran. Over 20,000 weapons were assembled from various armed engagements, and military experts were tasked to find a link back to the source -- Iran. Of course, no tangible link exists. But many will follow this “sleight-of-hand” maneuver and accept the inevitability of a war with Iran.

We would do well to remember a former writer named Len de Caux, who said in “Armies Of The Poor”: “Sometimes I’d hear a Communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme I’d feel embarrassed. Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience -- shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour. Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, and hands to clap.” So here we are again, and to the thousands who protested before the war began and the hundreds of thousands since, the Bush administration says, more or less, “So?” Well, my face is glowing, my head is nodding, and I’m clapping my hands! And I am no communist.

Governments of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy are never sustainable; such empires always fall from within. The wealthy have been leading this charge over the cliff with their golden parachutes and laser guided bombs. Hopefully we will learn that arrogance and greed have no place in a democracy. And we will reorganize ourselves accordingly.