Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Speaking Your Mind
Eight months ago this blog took a look at a much-lauded performance by Rosie O’Donnell on Geraldo Rivera’s show, which she somehow managed to get in while Rivera showered praise on her like a firehose of flattery. The transcript of this exchange disturbs me just as much today as it did back then. And it’s not because I disagree with O’Donnell’s comments, because I hear comments just like hers every day. It’s not because O’Donnell is an ugly woman, because I can & do hear comments from ugly women all the time. And it’s not because O’Donnell is a Hollywood pinhead with a big mouth and a tiny brain, because there are others in that camp as well.
What bugs me is this neverending adoration for “speaking your mind.” Just that and nothing more.
The time has come to revisit this, because now extravagant compliments are being shoveled out in Walter Cronkite’s direction, again for the simple act of “speaking your mind.” The final paragraph of this laudatory essay is “No wonder he’s some kind of hero” and up until that final sentence, you get to read about what makes Walter Cronkite a hero.
I’m dissatisfied. I don’t think the case has been made.
I want to be very precise in my criticism here. After all, writing a blog is all about “speaking your mind” but then again, nobody’s handed me any compliments just for doing that, neglecting the consideration of whether my opinion was actually valuable or not — nor would I accept such a compliment if it were handed to me.
An opinion is an opinion, nothing more, nothing less. By itself, the opinion proves nothing. We have no shortage of them. We really don’t. If opinions was gasoline, I could trade in my rice rocket for a Hummer and go traipsing around the wine country every damn day.
Here at the blog nobody reads, we have a very specific opinion about opinions, and this opinion about opinions runs afoul of the opinion the rest of the world has about opinions. That sentence, immediately preceding, is a real challenge; if you need to read it three times or more, go ahead and do it. Now that you understand what’s being said, I will explain.
We are entering a very dangerous time. A popular consensus has emerged about how we entertain opinions and measure the worthiness of those opinions before we repeat them, and before we act upon them. This consensus is problematic. The consensus that has emerged has something to do with identifying who stated the opinion and which political party that source identifies as being his/her own. Or…whether you have seen that source in a movie somewhere. We have other ways of evaluating opinions, independent of who presents them to us. We like to evaluate how the opinion makes us feel. Some of us give more weight to opinions that make us feel good. Some of us like to feel guilty, and therefore assign more weight to opinions that make us feel that way.
There is only ONE thing that makes an opinion worth anything, and that is a fact. Facts lead to opinions. Opinions resting upon something else, are…noise. That’s all. It doesn’t matter who says them.
It doesn’t matter.
The author of the article heaping praise upon Walter Cronkite, multiple times, for being “the most trusted man in America” doesn’t realize it but he’s wallowing in the Dark Ages. Walter Cronkite became the most trusted man in America during the “Daddy’s home!” generation of television news. If you’re my age, you were a young squirt during this generation. You would have been home from school for a few hours, you would have gone out and played if the weather was nice, it was getting on toward six o’clock, and Dad would come home. He’d get a drink, plop down in front of the TV, and watch the news. That meant everybody did.
And this is why I think even though the article is mistaken, it’s very important. During that entire generation, which ran on for forty years or more, this was the link between commoners and reality. Newspapers were not part of it. Newspapers were things your Grandpa read. Your immediate family tuned in at six o’clock, and after you went to bed, maybe they tuned in again at ten o’clock. That was it.
Do you feel good about that? Do you look back on these hours spent in your childhood, and the hours spent from the lives of your parents, all between six and seven in the evening — and say to yourself “that is when we really found out the important stuff that was happening in the world”?
Well, I don’t. I look back on those one-hour sessions with feelings best described as a mix of shame for how I chose to spend my time, and some measure of betrayal. I look back and I see a deadly faction of crazy Islamic extremists was rising up in the far east, while we argued back at home about whose proposed tax policy would soak the evil rich people among us to the extent “we” felt was just and proper. I see that when our government failed to protect innocent citizens from serial killers, rapists, kidnappers and sadists, we slaked our thirst for “justice” by watching make-believe movies about “vigilantes” gunning down “hoodlums,” usually in the subways of New York City, while we completely, utterly, overwhelmingly failed to bring this frustration into our judicial branch where it could have saved some lives.
In short, while pretending to be concerned about some very important domestic and overseas issues, we relied on this one-hour-an-evening to connect our intellects to reality. We were neglectful in settling for this. And the stewards of this umbilical connection, including “the most trusted man in America,” entirely failed us.
Two years ago we started a presidential election. The blogging community went to work on the “media” like a jackhammer on a porkchop. Dan Rather lost his job.
That happened because the media suddenly started having problems in 2004? I doubt that like hell. The media didn’t have a watchdog before 2004…not quite like what they had that year, anyway. Who knows how much stuff the blogging community missed, owing to the nacent phase that still enshrouds their collective development process, in that year? Who knows how much stuff the blogging community would have caught in decades previous, had they been around?
After the Tet Offensive, Cronkite went on television and said “the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate.” America evaluated the worthiness of this sentiment not by the facts that had been presented just before it, but by who said it.
Now, some of Cronkite’s critics make the charge that at this time, the war was going well. Cronkite, therefore, used public opinion to sabotage a military operation on the political stage, that was actually succeeding out in the field. Vietnam has gone down in history as a failure, so it’s easy to offer the opinion that Vietnam was already getting fouled up and Cronkite was simply stating the obvious. Except I don’t see anyone with a reputation worth protecting (other than Cronkite himself, whose reputation seems to have been galvanized beyond any possible effective assault) actually putting their testicles on a block, so to speak, and attaching their own name to the statement that Cronkite was speaking a verifiable truth. Yeah, they call him a hero and they say he speaks his mind.
But nobody really debates on an intellectual and factual basis whether his words had verity. It would make great sense to do so. Here. Now.
Well, rest-of-world, you do whatever you want. This is the blog that nobody reads. And over here, I think opinions are opinions. Famous people offer good ones, and they offer stupid ones. Spoken opinions are good here, bad there, good somewhere else, bad somewhere else. Unpoken opinions are valid sometimes, invalid at other times.
There’s no correlation between whether a person is outspoken, and whether or not he/she makes sense.
But the connection between how much your opinion is worth, and how much you’ve researched the evidence upon which that opinion is based…is rock-hard.
The bottom line is, everybody has a right to their opinion — but how much that opinion is worth, is the unique, invididual responsibility of the person speaking it.
Even if that person’s name is Walter Cronkite.
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