[Conor Friedersdorf]
Jack Shafer, Slate's excellent media columnist, offers up an e-mail interview with Michael Crichton. I want to highlight this bit:
...the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We've already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn't giving them the full story. By a long shot.
There's a lot of truth to that. I'm a voracious consumer of media, but prior to the Rev. Wright fiasco I'd never heard of Christian sermons of his style. It's a tradition I've read up on since. Weird that rhetoric inflammatory enough to dominate public discourse for weeks on end never garnered any kind of sustained attention before.
I'm also always struck by media coverage of religion. The Catholic church, for example, is often in the news. Few people are unaware of its official stance against birth control. It's a topic I argue about sometimes when I get together with a good friend who studies theology at Catholic University. He hasn't convinced me that the Catholic position on birth control is correct, but it sure is a lot more sophisticated than many of its opponents imagine, mostly because the reasoning behind the Catholic position on birth control is rarely fleshed out.
As someone who has read a lot of libertarian philosophy I'm a poor judge of popular exposure to views like those espoused by Ron Paul. Those who read this blog are probably similarly handicapped. Just in case, though, are there any readers who'd never heard certain arguments until Congressman Paul raised them during his campaign?
From the comments to this blog it would appear to many people had never heard a libertarian argument until Megan invaded The Atlantic.
I had never heard the argument that it was reasonable for someone to affix their name for years to newsletters containing racist spleen-venting without reading the newsletters or having any idea what they contained.
When society is ready for a set of ideas, it is all ears. When not, it is deaf. This is true regardless of the merits of the ideas. Rev. Wright and the authors of The Bell Curve both go unheard - because too many influential people's intellectual frameworks would need comprehensive retooling, or because the ideas are racist nonsense. You decide which is which.
Ken
I'd heard many of the standard libertarians ideas, but I hadn't heard much about going back to a gold standard.
"Prior to the Rev. Wright fiasco I'd never heard of Christian sermons of his style." And yet sermons were the op-eds of centuries...fast forward to now and popular views on magazines like the Atlantic..."I'd never read...etc.etc."
Thanks for pointing out the bit that Catholics suffer a disproportionately large amount of criticism. The thing that's most disheartening about it is that no one's forced to be Catholic (not past the age of eighteen, at any rate), so why should it matter if the Pope says birth control is a sin? Just don't believe it. Why constantly berate the Church all over the news when there are clearly a number of religious groups out there with far more inflammatory and oppressive beliefs, beliefs with less coherence and nuance at that.
And to answer the question of whether Dr. Paul was the first person I heard articulate certain arguments, I have to say that he was the first Republican I had heard of who had a serious, principled opposition to the war similar to my own. I had heard other people make his claims, but never an elected, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. It momentarily gave me hope that the Republican Party hadn't wholly dissociated itself from its libertarian wing (boy, was I wrong!).
The fact that you've never heard an inflammatory sermon is astounding. The religious right is a huge part of the republican machine. The republicans can't win without them.
What did you think they are doing on Wednesday and Thursday night? Exchanging baked goods?
The gold standard. That was new to me.