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June 21, 2008 Listening to talk radio recently I became slightly disturbed at a quip heard on CBC as they were doing a piece on the Musical ‘South Pacific’. The female narrator was waxing poetic on the Rogers and Hammerstein song ‘I’m GoinWash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’. It seems that in narrators view, during the fifties, the female of the species was expected to stay at home as the hubby went to work in order to make things spotless for him when he returned, 'wifey' all primed up, cocktail in hand, as the conquering hero returned at night, the song a rebellion against the status quo. Although I was only a kid at the time I remember the fifties and do not remember my mother or any of her friends being this way.Ah I thought, that was because at the time I was living in England (and the Far East) and she is talking about America. Maybe things were different there. I took stock in my meagre knowledge of America, and sure enough this was how it seemed to be the time according to the ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ and ‘Bewitched’. Later on this opened up another train of thought as I was listening to NPR as another female narrator discussed the works on the right wing author Ayn Rand. She too was berated, not for being part of the politically correct fifties family scene, but for not reflecting what they considered the family values of the day; her characters the complete opposite of the traditional type (as they supposed existed at that time). The media is the message. Now we are commenting not on what actually happened but on how history appears forty or so years later when viewing video made at the time. In order to communicate man first had to invent a way of leaving his thoughts in a fixation. The first fixation was the cave wall, the next clay tablets, the next papyrus ,and finally paper. Pictures were stylized in to pictograms which were eventually accompanied by cuneiform script, the ultimate being the phonetic type of script such as the Greek linear B; wiped out during the barbarian invasions of the tenth century ,to reappear as linear A. As the way of writing changed so did mans knowledge as phonetics allowed for a greater range of thought to be recorded within less space and with less effort. Are we returning to the age of the pictogram? Can society now divided into those more at ease with the pictogram and those with the phonetic way of recording events? Movies and TV would cover the former and talk radio and books would cover the latter, put more simply: Liberal movie and TV viewers; Conservatives talk show listeners and readers of books. I realize that the last part of the sentence is ambiguous as both liberals and conservatives both read books; but then the books liberals read lean towards those that agree with the video media while those read by conservatives seem to reflect the views of talk radio.
Video impedes thought as it makes a person lazy giving the impression that what is being watched is an actual event rather than an edited version of what happened. One who reads books has to a wide range to choose from and so has to meticulously scan the entire spectrum of knowledge. Are conservatives more intelligent than liberals?
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