Anecdoche – a situation where everyone is talking and no one is listening.
I’d like to propose an amendment to the word by suggesting that the people who champion this behaviour are anecdouches. Like little Donny Trump, or as I like to think of him, red dawn junior. In the last week the feckless ones brother has managed to take to the public stage to denigrate education and the teachers who provide that learning. He did so by stating that educators are filling young people’s heads with green deal and socialist ideas that are unamerican and an insult to the American dream. In juniors case, the American dream appears to be that you inherit money and power. Then you lie and cheat your way through each day, don’t pay taxes, fuck anyone you can over and then stand on a stage in a red hat and preach from your bullshit pulpit about hard work and the dream.
Regardless of what a person thinks of little don, it’s become increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that Donnie jr. and people like him have been given the opportunity and the stage to control some of the daily narrative in the United States.
This is a sad circumstance unless you’re an evangelical. Because this entitled idiot having any influence over opinion or policy is more of a harbinger of end of times than if the horsemen were to actually appear. I’ll search later, but I’m wondering if the bible has a line that reads, and an idiot shall lead them.
Controlling the narrative is a little more complicated than a slack jawed son of Satan taking the stage in a room full of mad red hatters though. Control doesn’t mean just being in possession of the microphone. Control also means limiting, discrediting or completely censoring an opposing narrative. If you run into a road block in the form of say, a free press, then you attack that opponent with fake news, enemy of the people bullshit until you can find a way to shut them down permanently and replace them with state run media.
Examples abound both at present and throughout history. The Goebbels Reich information machine, any newspaper in China, Iran, Russia or North Korea and of course Fox news just to name a few.
But, rightwing and religious nutjobs aren’t the only groups fighting to control the narrative. Every minority, special interest group and victimized internet community is also in on the game. Typically the victims are classified as liberal and the internet communities run the gamut from anti-vaxxers to PETA to Matt Drudge to breast feeding advocates.
The internet communities are sort of a bedlam laced brew of deranged selfishness mixed with conspiracies and a dash of misguided entitlement and real or perceived victimization.
Special interest groups are another matter altogether. These interest groups usually have cash. They own Wal-Mart and Home Depot or they’re the Conservative government of Ontario. These groups buy senators and advertising on New York billboards. In the case of the Ontario Conservatives, they use their money to establish their own propaganda site that praises the work of boss hog and his piglets.
If you don’t have cash to buy politicians then you need to roll up your sleeves and get inventive in your quest to control the narrative. Being offended appears to be a key component here. Then once offence is established the next step is to label those causing the perceived offence. Sexist, racist, misogynist, ageist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and on and on ad nauseum. The list is endless but the intent is the same in all cases. The accusing label is designed to control the fucking narrative and limit your adversaries options by making specific words or opinions
socially unacceptable.
We live in this anecdoche world now and I’m not sure what to think. I’m happy to have access to worldwide information but at the same time I’m sad for the most obvious causality of a state of anecdoche.
That would be facts or the truth.
We now live in a world where there are literally competing realities to accompany the competing narratives. This concerns me because if everything is true then logically nothing is true. How is it possible that I can change the channel from MSNBC to Fox and wonder if that channel switch has somehow transported me to an alternate reality in a parallel universe?
Every day the inhabitants of this planet are bombarded with opinion disguised as truth. Any attempt to differentiate between truth and opinion is immediately crushed by those people or groups who see their control of the narrative imperiled.
It’s obvious. It’s infantile and it’s destructive. Also I think the performance is making everyone fucking crazy.
Each day, I watch and read the news. Each day the sensation is like being seated for a performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Each day I take my seat and the performance begins. Each day I hope for something soothing, something harmonious. But as the music starts I realise that all the instruments are playing different tunes and that all the vocalists have chosen their own song.
And all I hear is noise.