Interlude:

The New Prophets

But before we discuss this last New Commandment, let me say something briefly about the New Preaching. It's called "reporting the news," or "entertainment," but it's really evangelization. (Incidentally, "evangelization" is from a Greek word meaning "reporting the good news," which is what the early Christians believed they were doing.)

But the news reporters don't realize they're preaching, of course. They don't think they have any bias; far from it; they're the ones who see things objectively, without all the prejudice that comes from believing in souls and resurrections and gods and things. In fact, it's amazing to listen to these round-tables they constantly have on the subject of bias: they "investigate" and come to the sober conclusion that No, there's really no bias there, when it stares everyone in flyover country in the face. But everybody they talk to considers what they're doing objective--because they never talk to anybody but New Moralists. Why should they? They have scientific fact behind them: evolution and global warming and passive-smoking data. It's the other kooks who trump up phony evidence to bolster positions that no normal sane person would even consider.

And the result is that certain events just plain don't get reported, and others get blown way out of proportion. For instance, you might see a shot on January 22 of a bunch of people in the streets protesting on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but what's covered is the NOW counter-protest--and the camera never pans back to show the mall in Washington just packed with hundreds of thousands.

You hear a tremendous amount about bombing of abortion clinics and the resultant threat to the citizenry, but you don't hear about killing of pro-lifers. (Yes, there have been a few. Are you surprised? You shouldn't be; people, in case you don't know, feel passionately on both sides of this issue, and there are always kooks.) Police brutality against the civil rights protesters or environmentalists is very carefully documented and bruited abroad; police brutality against Operation Rescue is met with total silence. Crimes of whites against blacks merit headlines for weeks; crimes by blacks against whites are buried on page 20. Crimes against gays get front-page play for weeks; crimes by gays against straights get two inches.

And in politics, the speeches of Republicans refuting the blatant contradictions of the Democrats can be found only if you tune to C-Span; the networks can't be bothered. Or rather, they can be, when the speech can be edited to show how trogloditic and mean-spirited the speaker is. Notice how the Secretary of State of Florida was always the "Republican" Secretary of State, a party hack, while the canvassing boards counting dimples and pregnant chads were never called Democrats, though that's what they were; the Florida Supreme Court was an august body, worthy of the deepest respect, while the "divided" U. S. Supreme Court was railroaded by the Conservative majority.

(While I'm on this topic, a word I've never heard anyone else say: We now know (those of use who have access to news other than the networks) that there were all kinds of illegal voters in Florida, people who voted more than once, and so on. There were all kinds of reports of fraud in the recounting of Broward County--and in general, chicanery was rampant. And the Florida Supreme Court did everything in its power--in fact, a good deal more than was in its power--to ensure that the chicanery went on long enough for a Gore victory to be pulled from the jaws of defeat.

As I see it, the problem the U. S. Supreme Court had was how not to allow the Democrats to steal the election without getting into criminal charges of fraud and so on, which could take years and would split the country apart--especially given the News Media's preaching--I mean reporting--that of course Gore had really won, even though legally you couldn't prove it. For them, following Jesse Jackson, it was the Republicans who were stealing the election, intimidating black voters (in black counties run by Democrats where Gore won by landslides, strangely enough) and "stopping the count" and all the rest.

What was the Court to do? The evidence of fraud was there for everyone to see. But something had to be done, and so the majority found a way to invalidate the--clearly unconstitutional, and recognized as such by its own Chief Justice--move by the Florida Supreme Court before the phony "recount" had occurred, which would have enabled the Gore people to claim that the people had spoken in his favor--and they would have; a way would have been found if they'd had the time.

So, sure it was irregular. Sure what should have been done is gather evidence of the fraud--it was in fact being gathered--and bring it to court. But practically speaking, this was impossible. Frankly, I think it was, in the situation, a stroke of genius, because it caused a fuss for a week and then it was all over, and justice was in fact served. I am in admiration at Justices Scalia and Thomas, who obviously were behind this.

To connect this up, you may hear speculation about voter intimidation, but you'll never hear on ABC anything like what I was just saying. Because I'm biased, and objective reporting just can't be bothered with it.

Again, how many of you heard the objective fact that Newt Gingrich was exonerated of the ethics charges against him? True, he was driven out of office as an evil hypocrite, but now that he's gone, how is it news that he was right all along? What "the people" are concerned about is the fact that Bill Clinton was railroaded, and we just barely managed to stop the train.

Have you noticed, too, that the news media conduct polls and then tell us what the American People think? Not what the polls say, but what the American People think. And they beat this over the head--when the American People think along the same lines as the news anchors. Do the reporters who spend so much time on these polls even realize that it's a neat way of influencing the waverers, by showing what "everyone" thinks? Everyone wants to be in tune with everyone. Perhaps they're not so Machiavellian; they just do the poll, find the results and say, "Wow! I knew it! That's news!"

But of course, when John Zogby, for instance, comes up with something that contradicts the comfortable conclusions, you either don't hear about it, or the results are pooh-poohed (never mind that Zogby predicted the last three elections much better than ABC or NBC or Gallup). It does make one ponder, doesn't it?

I told the New York Times recently that I'd decided to drop my subscription, after suffering through reading the Sunday Times for more than thirty years. I discovered that lately all I'd been able to stand was the crossword puzzle. The nice lady I was talking to asked me why I was dropping it, and I said, "Well, either I've grown or you have; but the paper seems more and more to be, instead of 'all the news that's fit to print,' 'all the news that's printed to fit.'" I thought that was clever; but all she did was make polite noises of regret, no doubt because it was a shame I had got mired in my right-wing bias.

However, let me stress: I am not accusing these people of a conspiracy to manage the news; it's just that they are overwhelmingly New Moralists, even by their own admission. So the news manages to get managed by osmosis, so to speak. Many of them honestly don't know that they only hear and repeat what they want to hear; they are so spun themselves that to them spin is a straight line.

And why is this? Because, in the Sixties, they perceived the news to be managed, and so large numbers of them got into journalism "to make a difference" (i.e. to get it right, and get out the truth), encouraged by their professors. They still do. And don't forget that one of the main tactics of Communism was to infiltrate the universities and the news and entertainment media, on the understandable grounds that if you can control these, you can eventually turn the thinking of the whole people around. Which is not to say that the reporters and so on I've been talking about are Communists, but (a) Communists are precursors to and have the same base in a pseudo-science that New Moralists have, and (b) the causes Communists stand for and the causes New Moralists stand for are very similar. Furthermore, everybody, from Communists to existentialists to philosophy professors, to linguists, had bought into the gobbledygook that truth has nothing to do with what is "out there."

So when the kids in journalism school heard their left-wing teachers reinforce their core beliefs, they naturally went along and thought that any educated person not blinded by dogmas held them; and then when they got out into the field, they gradually supplanted the reporters who made it their business to dig up all the news and just lay it out for people to see. That didn't make a difference; it didn't shape the mind of the readers and viewers. I mean, facts! What's a fact? What is truth?

Truth is the agenda, remember? So we had a network blow up a truck on television to prove the truth that the gas tank was unsafe--because they couldn't get the tank to blow up by itself. But since they knew it was unsafe, then they were showing the truth when they helped it explode. Or when the film crew infiltrated the supermarket chain they had targeted and then filmed themselves engaged in unsanitary practices, this was truth, because they couldn't get it on tape any other way--but they knew that things like this were going on, didn't they? So what's wrong with showing it? Or the "reporter" who wrote up stories of the indignities the blacks in the school were going through, as if she was telling what she'd actually heard, rather than the kind of thing she knew was happening. She was getting out the truth about the situation; and if the actual events never happened, so what?

And, of course, in the Clinton matter, the truth is that it was just about sex and this is a private matter, and the truth is that the House Managers, and especially Henry Hyde, were simply full of hatred and out to destroy the President, and the truth is that the President is not self-serving and slimy, but the shining knight of the real truth, which is the New Morality--and it's no wonder that the Bible-thumpers can't stand him and are trying to destroy him. So that's what we heard, day after day, week after week, for a year. Of course we did; because that was the truth. Linda Tripp was the slimeball, because she betrayed Monica. (Linda, by the way, said that she did it to save Monica, who was about to be destroyed. Oh, sure! --But without the stain on the dress, which Linda urged Monica to keep, what would you give for Monica's reputation?)

It makes sense. If your notion of truth is the agenda, then your notion of reporting is what anyone else would call propaganda.

And it is making a difference--a big one, and they know it. I don't see how the news media can be unaware that they got President Clinton elected in the first place. During the original primary campaign, he was the subject of close scrutiny by the press, particularly concerning Gennifer Flowers and the draft, with their adroit questions keeping the issues alive; but as soon as it became clear that he had the nomination locked up, all that stopped, and suddenly we were in the worst economy in fifty years, with no one questioning this (though it was patently false); President Bush's tax increase was an unmitigated disaster, and a middle-class tax cut was absolutely essential, and the figures "establishing" this were never examined. But then when Clinton got elected, surprise, surprise! The economy had got much worse, and try as he might, he couldn't come up with the tax cut, and had to raise taxes yet again; and still nobody pointed out that the figures he was now giving about the state of the economy were above the ones he had used in the campaign. And, to everyone's amazement, the economy had now become the best in generations; and it's continued that way throughout his Presidency, in spite of the slowdown at the very end because Bush stole the election--of course, of course.

And in the 2000 election, "reporting" did little things like give special play to that ad that connected Bush to the dragging death of the black man, project a Gore win in Florida before the polls had closed in the Republican part of the state, and so on. Gore was a disaster as a candidate, but he was all they had, and they did their best, and they almost succeeded. How they must have raged!

If you're conservative, you know the story; if you're not, of course, then what I just said is conservative spin. Unfortunately, the conservative spin comes from places like the Congressional Budget Office and other official Government sources. But that's just a detail; all the papers and television report just the opposite, so who are we going to believe?

So I don't think there's any question that the New Moralist reporters are making a difference; though people seem to be becoming more and more suspicious of them. Viewers are watching less and less of CNN and NBC and ABC and CBS; and these networks wonder why. For the same reason that people in Russia didn't really read Pravda. True, there's no government control of the press in the United States; it's just that during the Clinton years, the government in control was controlled by the same attitude that's controlling the media--and the people began to catch.

Even the business of presenting "both sides" of an issue gets spun in the present state of the press. It depends on what issue you're talking about how the other side gets presented. In cases where the main event is favorable to the New Morality, the people on the other side are presented in such a way as to look either ridiculous or fanatical.

Even in the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, which, I think, is the program that tries hardest really to give both sides of the issues, the "other side" tends to be represented either by considerably less articulate spokesmen, or by wishy-washy ones who make so many qualifications that they can't be distinguished from "our side." (It does seem as if Paul Gigot is coming into his own, though.) The trouble here is the ones on the New Moralist side don't even realize that they're on any side at all; it's only the viewers on the other side who realize it, and that the other side is the outside--and pretty far outside at that.

But in fact, there are some issues in which there aren't two sides. And if you bristle at this, why are you taking umbrage at my suggesting that there might be two sides to the question "There are always two sides to every issue"?

For instance, in reporting on the O.J. trial, to take the evidence against Simpson and equate it with Mark Furman's use of "nigger" as "the other side" is gross distortion of the situation. To equate what President Clinton did with Henry Hide's long-ago affair, as if you're giving "both sides" of the issue, is to manufacture the illusion that "it was all about sex and nothing else," which totally ignores the use of the machinery of government to fix a court trial. When one side has the facts and the other side only lies and distortions, giving both sides is anything but fairness.

"But who are we to decide? We just report." Oh, right. Aren't reporters supposed to dig behind stories to see what basis they have in fact, not just accept everything at face value? When "Catholics for Free Choice" makes a pronouncement about abortion, aren't you supposed to discover that this is an "organization" in name only, and not call it a "Catholic" one? It has no members, and in fact has no connection with either the Catholic Church or with any real segment of Catholicism; so it's about as much "the other side" in the "Catholic debate" about abortion as a statement by Protestants and Other Americans United.

But, of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, and the news is being made in the direction of a refutation of some New Moralist tenet, digging goes as deep as China. Let some scientist dare to claim that global warming isn't happening, and his whole life comes up for scrutiny. Every detail of Linda Tripp's follies was known, once it was found that she was behind the bimbo eruption that turned out to be Monica Lewinsky.

Thank God for the Internet and talk radio!--which, of course, the Government is trying to regulate. Rush Limbaugh gets calls every now and then complaining that he doesn't give equal time on his show to views differing from his, and a while back, there was an attempt to pass legislation to the effect that talk radio had to do this. It died, thank goodness. Rush's answer to this has always been, "I am equal time."

As far as the Internet goes, what you hear from the mainstream press is, "How can you pay attention to that? It can't be trusted." That's true, of course. Anybody can put anything he wants on the Internet, including bald-faced lies, and statements with no factual backing at all. So what else is new? But this is different from what we now have from the mainstream press?

At least in these sources, you know where they stand; you don't get bias presented as if it were objectivity. And with talk radio and the Internet, we now know that there's another view out there; and we do learn things that somehow never get reported in the mainstream until the story becomes so widespread that they have to report it. Look at the President and Monica, which was sat on until Matt Drudge got hold of it. (Incidentally, the Drudge Report has links to all kinds of news sources, both left and right. No attempt to suppress "the other side" here.)

Entertainment as propaganda.

But who watches the news nowadays? A recent survey (there we go with polls again) revealed that forty per cent of the people during the Lewinsky mess didn't know who Monica Lewinsky was. Forty per cent! Now granted, that doesn't mean that those forty per cent didn't know that President Clinton had got himself sexually involved with someone and was in trouble for it; it might just mean that the name itself didn't register. Let's hope so.

But still, what it says is that people as a whole aren't really paying much attention to the news. Why should they? It's boring, and if there's one thing people of the present age shun, it's boredom. "In depth" coverage of anything can't take more than three minutes or the remote comes into play.

But not to worry; there are things that people pay attention to, and they can be reached through them: TV sitcoms and dramas, movies, and especially music.

I don't think I have to say much of anything about the state of television, with all the sex and violence we have on it. The sex is understandable, because this, of course, is the essence of the New Morality. And don't let them kid you by saying that it's what the people want. Not when the Ellen DeGenerate show preaching lesbianism went on and on in spite of the ratings, and when Nothing Sacred, that show about the "progressive" priest, bombed and was kept on the air for almost a year anyway. (It got rave reviews, of course--which shows something about the reviewers.)

But the main source of evangelization of the New Morality is music. In the Republic, Plato twenty-five hundred years ago proposed strict censorship of literature and music for his ideal society, even going into questions about what rhythms and tunes were acceptable and what were degrading.

When we look at our culture in the past forty or so years, he may well have a point. There's no question that the New Morality came in at the same time rock music did; and that it really took off with Elvis and the Beatles. Elvis shocked people of my generation with his pelvic gyrations and his obvious sexually-aroused tremolo--though what he sang sounds pretty tame today. Which should give us pause. Elvis legitimized the sexual revolution. And, of course, the clean-cut Beatles (who were neatly dressed, in spite of the furor their hair caused) did the same for the drug culture with their cutsey references to "Mother Mary comes to me," and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and "Norwegian Wood," and all the rest of the allusions that we older fogies didn't get, but those in the know did.

The thing about music is that it acts directly on the emotions, and you don't have to think to get it. I remember one day some years ago I was driving my two (by that time grown-up) kids somewhere, and they had on a popular music station. "Turn that thing off!" I said, and my daughter said, "Why?" "That song is filthy!" "But you used to like it when you drove me to high school and it was on." "I never listened to a song that said, [I don't remember the words I repeated, but it was as explicit as you can get about sexual intercourse and still be on the radio]." There was a pause. Then she said, "You're right; it does say that. I never paid attention to the words before."

But does that mean they didn't get through? You hear it often enough, and it sinks in without your realizing it. But it's not just the words. Plato was right; the rhythm and the melody and the harmony "say" something to the emotions. Try putting rock lyrics to Gregorian chant, and see if there isn't a clash; or try singing the Te Deum to the tune of Light my Fire, and you'll see the incongruity on the other side--in fact, you've probably heard something like it, if you've been in certain Catholic churches lately. The obtuseness of the "with-it" clergy knows no bounds.

Elvis's music perfectly fit Elvis's lyrics and their overtones, which perfectly fit his intonations and gestures; it's a celebration of promiscuous sex, and letting go of all restraint upon emotions--the Fourth New Commandment.

And then, of course, there was the pseudo-folk music which was New Morality social commentary: Blowin' in the Wind, If I Had a Hammer, and so on. That graduated into the unintelligible sort of lyrics that grace the more sophisticated rock music of the present. "Significant" words appear at intervals, giving the listener the impression that he's listening to something that means something; but they are interspersed among random words chosen for the sound--and for the purpose, it seems, of destroying meaningfulness, clarity, and logic. Now maybe this is just me, and there's something underneath these things that makes sense if you're real smart.

My problem, of course, if this is the case, is that I can't escape the notion that I'm reasonably intelligent, and tolerably well-informed and educated; so that I've got to the stage where if I can't make head or tail of something, I have a strong suspicion that there's no head or tail there. I'm "into" classical music, mainly; but I've had the same problem with contemporary stuff in that genre. I have made sincere efforts over the years, and I recognize that there are composers like Stravinsky and Penderecki who have something valid to say and say it well. But there are others, I am more and more convinced, who are doing the esthetic equivalent of the First New Commandment and shouting at the top of their voices the "truth" that there is no truth.

Which is not to say that there isn't some significant modern music, or rock music for that matter; a real artist can do things with almost any medium. What I'm arguing here, however, is not that; I'm saying that most popular music is what it's always been: propaganda; it's just that now it's propaganda for the New Morality, both in the lyrics and in the rest of the music. Listen to a rock station, and then turn to one of those "retro" stations that plays the music of the Fifties, and you can see the difference in what the songs are promoting. This is not to say that the music of the Fifties is better music; most of it, too, is esthetic trivia if not garbage--as popular stuff always is. But what it's about is a world the present age laughs at as stupid; and so the triviality of the music then is seized upon as proving how idiotic was the goal it advocated--without realizing that the music of the present is just as trivial, but isn't recognized as such, because the listeners buy into the goals it promotes. That's real, man!

Let me digress a moment about the implications of gangsta rap and that sort of thing. Talk about racial profiling! (I know I know, Eminem is white; but he's doing black music, let's face it.) If this deserves hearing because it's part of "the black experience," then this means that what it talks about--rape, cop killing, slaughter--is universal throughout the black community. Black people are saying, "That's how we are, and you'd better get used to it." Then is it surprising to find that people--including black people--regard young black men as a menace? Until some black leader comes along and repudiates all this and can convince kids, and black kids especially, to stop listening to it, on the grounds that it's no more "the black experience" than Charles Manson is a representative of "the white experience" because he's white. It's the thug experience, something that no decent person should have anything to do with, whatever his color.

The point I want to make here is that music is perhaps more insidious and much more difficult to deal with than the more obvious forms of entertainment or news management, precisely because it doesn't seem as if anything of significance is being conveyed, at least if the lyrics seem innocuous. I mentioned a while back that Sinatra song, Love and Marriage, which people I talk to think is wholesome, not realizing that it's ridiculing the connection between love and marriage. That message gets through without your realizing it because of the tune and the emotional overtones of the poetry; and insofar as you find yourself humming it, you're reinforcing the attitude it has toward love and marriage.

It's precisely because people don't realize that actual information gets conveyed by means of emotionally-based relationships, which is the basis of art and esthetics in general, that when I point this out, I get looked at as if my head were a Picasso sculpture. Hell, music is just a bunch of sounds, for God's sake!

My contention is that you can't "dig" the kinds of sounds that come out of heavy metal and gangsta rap, and enjoy them and want to hear more of them, and simultaneously be comfortable with the idea that virginity is precious and that the relation between the sexes is something that is spiritual first and carnal second and as a consequence of two people's spiritual and personal union--not without a compartmentalization worthy of Bill Clinton at his finest. And the reason is that the emotional attitude of the one, whatever the lyrics might superficially say (and they generally make no secret of their attitude), is the direct antithesis of the emotional attitude of the other. You might just as well play The Stars and Stripes Forever as a dirge at a funeral as say that this kind of music is compatible with anything but sexual trivialization and license.

To be perfectly frank, I don't a really good way to fight this. When kids are young, parents can, of course, censor what they watch on television and listen to in music. But when they grow into their teens--certainly, their late teens--I don't see how you can stop them from hearing the music their peers are listening to.

I suppose the only thing that can realistically be done is to teach them that music does mean something; that it instills and reinforces an attitude toward life, and that some attitudes toward life are true and worth cultivating, and others are pernicious and to be avoided. And, when they're ten and eleven, getting to the stage where they'll still listen to you but want to think for themselves and follow their peers, you have to point out that it's both yucky and unhealthy to play with feces; and it's yucky and unhealthy to do the same thing with your mind. And certain types of music and TV and movies are the mental equivalent of playing with feces. Even if everyone around you is doing it, it's not something to copy if you want to keep your mind healthy and smelling decent.

But they'll get the opposite from the most unlikely places, like in church, if the clergy are trying to be "relevant." Which brings us once again to the Tenth New Commandment and then the epilogue to the whole book.