[. . . slightly edited and excerpted. What got me going then? vs. now as it would be more obviously justified.]
In street and alley what strange tongues are these,/ Accents of menace in our ear.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Unguarded Gates, 1882
I refer here not to different languages but to language distorted, seemingly intentional and decidedly intentional. These voices have gained greater and greater prominence. The slants this way and that on who and what and when and where and why have directly threatened and struck the alarms of coming terror and pending totalitarianism, although the speakers are not the ones we fear but the energies and machinations behind these messengers.
Are the messengers themselves part of the conspiracy? To be sure in that they speak the distortions, contrary to facts and accurate memory. So those to blame, if blame it is, are these mediums as well as the nameless making up the hoards who would move us off center and towards an agenda of uncertain rationality and often insanity. Can we speak of particulars? of people and events in detail to support this claim? Surely, but my beef is not with these things but with the accents of menace who would fill our ears with rotting offal and outright garbage.
[Long quotation about socialism here from Wikipedia, including this, "Created . . . with the purpose of building a classless society."]
Those people and forces at play to move us in a direction counter to fact, to reason, to the most accurate understandings of things past, they wish to build a one-class society in the image of imagined or contrived truths and skewed values. Danger. Therein lies our peril, while at the same time the mediums abhor the notions of socialism, including efforts at reforms that look at what is and pose what could be. Reform to these is less and regress, but less means more and regress means what it was, which is to say how it is, some imagined status quo as they would have it. Such entrenchment under the guise of adjustment and change merely keeps them on their podia.
Would they stop talking were their pictures of what is or what should be become manifest? Once a distorter, always a distorter. Or, in normal parlance, probably not. The power felt by creating discord seduces; they will ride a new horse warning that the red coats are coming without ever having seen one, or substantiate-able evidence that that (new) menace lies in wait. They will do so because of that power, or the felt power that the attention, money or other "gain" has brought them.
Goofballs we can dismiss. Clever twisters and those who reinforce common misunderstandings and half truths--they are evil and we should also dismiss.
Where are the champions, that is to say, experts in knowledge, who tell it as it is and was and can correct the accents, the distortions? Without making the same performative error by killing off the opposition, literally or figuratively, how can we interrupt the most influential flows of misinformation?
I have long said that if you want to change the relationship with the other, you have to change the pattern of communicating with them. The usual approach is to try to directly affect them; doesn't work. People convinced they are right do not change. Talk till the proverbial come home merely consoles you and makes you the opposite "right", and thus not open to understanding, and change--if that is what is warranted.
We change our understanding on any side not by direct frontal assaults but by undermining the strength of the floors upon which the other stands. That is to say, if what has been distorted is left to stand on a weak foundation without attack at what's below, history will eventually make error fall. However, in whole or in part the process can be accelerated.
The time has come for acceleration, and in the case of accents that menace--
Two conditions must prevail along with undermining. One, a greater than and opposite offensive needs to be mounted to change the direction of the onslaught as, two, the onslaught needs to be exposed for what it is. In the case of accents of menace, this means to tell the most accurate truth in the most convincing fashion and to explain the errant ways. Take the stage away from them.
[Long rant here, unintelligible.]
I suspect, on the other hand, that in the case of political impotence or inability, you find new things to direct your feelings toward. And thus you find yourself changing from reading the news and the leaks to reading other things. After all there is more to the panoply of phenomena than power influence and preoccupation of what the other should or should not be doing. It is then about me and my small circle. It is about what we do and experience outside this more public and fractious world. It is about different truths and realities, more personal and private ones. And if not about health or physical well being, it will be about culture and beauty.
So it is I find myself turning again to what I will call art and expression and the richness of what I see, hear, taste, smell, and can touch. Life and living become important again. I bottle up emotions in certain aspects of my life and my history and what I can see if I look outward and find disturbing. I let them, my emotions, have free reign in matters of beauty and love and appreciation and understanding. I do not have to understand a mendacious world, only a world that is immediately around and inside me.
I have this peace now. I wish it for you.
