House of Eratosthenes

I can remember when Bush got in for the second time, just feeling like so much of the problem about the way that politics go here is that people are improperly informed. That they didn’t know that they had been lied to, or they didn’t understand exactly to what extent they had been, and they still thought that there were weapons of mass destruction. And that was just crazy to me that people could be so under-informed.

This is Emily Mortimer, who is “kind of a political person,” born in London in 1971 but has spent some chunk of time, or chunks of time, on this side of the pond over here with us rubes. She’s making a new show. It’s going to tell us what we should be thinking. Obviously, she’s bringing some passion to the job. Delightful…

Hat tip to Sonic Charmer, who backwards-compliments her again and again, until she’s nothing more than rubble and there’s a smoking crater were she used to be standing…as is his style.

Her comments get stranger…

I stopped being up on the news entirely when I was doing this job. I didn’t read a paper or watch the television news for many months. And now it’s been quite hard to get back into it. It’s so loaded now because of this job that I’m doing. Even picking up the New York Times feels kind of loaded with meaning; I feel berated every time I look at it, like”‘Oh God, all these people know what they’re doing and I was just pretending.”

…and…stranger…

There’s so much wrong with England, but I think people are informed in general. I’m going to make a huge sweeping statement, but you just get the news much more [in England]. Listening to radio stations that play pop music all day and all night, the news will come on every two hours, foreign news too. It’s part of your daily routine, being informed about what’s going on in the world. Whether you like it or not, you can’t really escape it. I don’t think the same is true here, and television broadcast news especially seems to me to be a pretty dicey area. You can’t rely on getting the facts, or getting them presented in a way that is actually objective and makes sense and puts people in a position where they can make informed decisions about who to vote for. It’s just over-sensationalized and, as our show keeps pointing out, one of the big problems is that they act like there’s just two definite sides to every discussion — and that’s just not necessarily the case, but it feeds into the way this country has just become completely polarized. This Tea Party is presented on the television as the viable alternative instead of like a lunatic fringe.

…and stranger still…to the point where she logically contradicts herself within adjacent sentences:

I do think there’s a danger with mixing politics and entertainment, and I think Aaron is really aware of that and feels like the show’s going to work based on whether the relationships work. But what I love about him is that he is brave about going there, and if people are going to be watching his show, why not use it to make them think about something that is important to think about?

Well my goodness, what a piece of work this fine thespian is. Just a higglety-pigglety messed-up potpourri of a perfect concoction of the kind of person whose opinion doesn’t mean two shits to me!

She’s an actress, genetically gifted from what I can make out, carefully made up so all of her appeal to straight men has been washed away, ridiculous eyebrows, over-pouty lips, cartoonish facial caricature like a Jim Henson muppet, bony as a bag of antlers, politically active, politically identifying, politically-hard-left, brassy & sassy, working with the “brave” Aaron Sorkin on yet another snotty preening pretentious opinion-pushing piece of cable tripe, waggling some man-hand wrinkly finger at us for being uninformed while simultaneously admitting she doesn’t know a goddamn thing.

Where do we get to the part where I’m supposed to pay attention to what she thinks?

And…once again, I have to ask…what is the thought process in the boardrooms? How do they figure out what the next show should be? Is it based on “What our lineup really needs, that it’s missing…”? I hope not. It looks a lot more like a game of “let’s just keep doing what we did the last time.” Are they seriously expecting to be making money this way?

I do agree with her that there is a problem with Americans being uninformed. I disagree with her test; like many on the left stateside and in the UK, she seems to be conducting “outcome-based” assessments, leaping to the conclusion that anyone who votes the same way she does must know what they’re talking about, and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. That is a mistake. There may be some people in the Tea Party who agree with me, but I would never presume the average attendee there knows more about arcane details about foreign or domestic policy than, say, E.J. Dionne, who pretty much disagrees with me on everything. See, humility; the willingness to admit that maybe some people who agree with me, do so for the wrong reasons, and some of the people who disagree might know something of what they’re talking about. Evidently lacking in this humility, Ms. Robinson shows her simplicity of thought when she presumes a bunch of airhead producers & actresses must know more than George F. Will, just because they imbibe deeply the elixir of progressive orthodoxy. Life isn’t all neatly layered like that. Idiots sometimes make good decisions, and “smart” people are sometimes caught making mistakes. If they have a reputation for being smart, and said reputation more or less hangs in the ether without solid evidence to hold it up, they tend to make mistakes in fact…big ones, repeatedly, as they refuse to admit their mistakes.

And the idea that the state-owned state-run radio stations “play[ing] pop music all day and all night, the news will come on every two hours” and this will somehow “educate” you…that is hazardous in all kinds of ways. SC nailed it pretty well I thought:

…what she appears to be saying is that in England the news is far more lovingly and carefully prepackaged into digestible and state-approved propaganda, and is so much more ubiquitous (even played on pop music stations, etc.), that everyone dutifully knows exactly what to think.

Which adds to her reverse-credibility, as someone whose opinion I can not and shall not take seriously. She’s like a nearly-perfect construct…all she has to do is join the Occupy Movement, mutter some words about “9/11 was an inside job,” and she’ll be there.

This is why I hold Hollywood in such contempt. There seems to be some problem going on in the acting profession in which, when people listen to themselves opine about something, they make the dangerous mistake of imagining themselves to be informed as if they just got done listening to someone else opine. I recall briefly taking drama in my freshman year in high school, and there was something about “getting into character.” You had to believe you were Hamlet, or Willie Loman, or whatever…and perhaps that is the problem. They really do think they know what they’re talking about, because the job requires that they believe this to be true.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

This reminds me of a calculus class, that I took a few years back. It was taught by an instructor from Ireland, and he spent much of the class bitching about the Bush administration. Can’t we find clueless Americans to hire?

This woman has never read much of the British press from what I can tell. It’s even more tabloid-like than our own.
- teripittman | 06/24/2012 @ 10:51
You had to believe you were Hamlet, or Willie Loman, or whatever…and perhaps that is the problem. They really do think they know what they’re talking about, because the job requires that they believe this to be true.

Yup. This is the reason all faddish trend-surfing hipsters are liberals — they lack identity. Their “personality” is a collection of affects. People with a core know what they don’t know, and so they have no trouble making banal small talk with strangers

Liberals, on the other hand, will make a political “joke” or comment within the first five minutes of any conversation. If they’re in a room full of other obvious liberals, it’ll be within two minutes. They’ll stick their politics into record reviews, Facebook updates, anywhere, everywhere, like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant. Sometimes it’s relatively subtle — a liberal never says “I heard on the radio,” for instance; it’s always “I was listening to NPR the other day and I heard” — but often it’s as blatant as their bumper stickers. They have to make the gestures, and keep making the gestures, lest anyone find out they’re just gestures.

I’d wager Emily Mortimer’s next paycheck that she hasn’t read an entire book through since college. I’d bet that, like everyone who rails against “Faux News,” she’s never actually watched a single program. Consider this unintentionally revealing soundbite from the interview: one of the big problems is that they act like there’s just two definite sides to every discussion. The gesture she’s trying to make, of course, is the standard one about “nuance,” how rustic to think there’s only right and wrong, life is full of subtle shades of gray, &c. But given that literally everyone she knows believes exactly as she does…. to be “informed” is to agree with her and all her friends, full stop, reflexively.

Nobody who has a clear sense of who she really is ever makes these outcome-based assessments. I actually sorta feel sorry for her — it’s not that she’s silly and uninformed; it’s just that she doesn’t really have anything inside to hold onto. The empty gestures of liberal politics take the place of a real personality. It’s sad.
- Severian | 06/24/2012 @ 11:06
I suppose there must be some encouragement for Brit “talent” to see some of their most SMASHING successes in GB actually get their own “intellectual opinion” teleprompter shows in the US.
- CaptDMO | 06/24/2012 @ 12:07
[…] at House of Eratosthenes and Right Wing […]
- Emily’s Wisdom | Washington Rebel | 06/25/2012 @ 06:56
Sadly, I have (well, had) a friend who fits into Sev’s description, a good friend from my college days whom I lost track of for several years.

We wound up meeting each other at a funeral for a mutual friend’s father. Obviously it’s a solemn occasion, but you think you’d still find topics to discuss, especially with a guy you haven’t seen in years – catching up with who’s starting a family, where people work, etc. But fairly quickly in, he felt compelled to state, rather defiantly, that he didn’t mind saying that his views had become far more liberal over the years.

What did politics have to do with anything? Why was it one of the earliest topics of conversation – why was it a topic at all, when it would have been made plain while discussing a host of other things that may have come up organically as we caught up? But no, he put it out there unprompted, from way out of the blue… and it just sat there, isolated. In fact it pretty much killed the conversation. I couldn’t have cared less about his politics, as evidenced by my not asking at all about them in any way; I didn’t want to talk about anything else and have it suddenly become a political lesson, so predictably, there suddenly became nothing safe to talk about.
- nightfly | 06/26/2012 @ 14:07
Europeans are not more informed than Americans, they are more highly misinformed.
- xlibrl | 06/26/2012 @ 23:55

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Emily’s WisdomSunday, June 24th, 2012

Emily’s Wisdom
Sunday, June 24th, 2012