Attitude of crude given too much latitude

I was in Miami a few years ago for a convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America. In my hotel room I had the radio on when a commercial assaulted my ear. One of the nation’s priciest cars was advertising, but in the same undignified way I had heard it promoted back home: a screaming huckster shouting that I visit the Miami dealer now. To boot, it was the very same announcer I had heard in my rectory hyping the same car at a local outlet. I concluded that Detroit wanted this kind of offensive ad used nationwide for some percentage of its dealerships, and probably because it works. I resolved never to buy from that manufacturer and urge others to boycott it.

I make the same recommendation to voters shopping for the best candidate or platform. Discourse has become so foul that editorial columns more and more bemoan the lack of respect in politics. Shout radio and bombastic TV aggressors savage the other side, and please note that one side does it more than the other. Probably for the same reason: it has been shown to work. It annoys the listener to the point that the product name digs into one’s consciousness, to emerge weeks later at election time. It does not rely on rational argument or on political record. It shuns these. In fact it removes the need to think out the merits of political argument. That’s too much work.

I think we have become habituated to this kind of anti-logic. We no longer see it as an intellectual cop-out, and we seem to believe that if someone is emotionally shouting some point, it has to be the truth. Otherwise why would the spokesperson get so exercised? It is all around us. It sells anything at all. So it was natural for it to creep like poison ivy into political speech. We have become tolerant of it because it is used so often. We no longer take offense to it perhaps because we don’t want to be seen as out of step. It can’t be wrong if it is so widespread, could it?

“Abortion is allowable because it is a right given by the Supreme Court.” “Health care reform is bad because it proposes death panels.” “Promiscuity provides a normal outlet for normal human drives.” “Private property preempts all socialist calls to redistribute wealth.” “Opponents of gay marriage are bigoted in the same way as racists.” “The 2003 Iraq war was just because Iraq is to blame for 9/11.” “Children should be exempt from discipline and punishment because these hurt their self-esteem.” “American prosperity depends on unrestricted consumption of resources regardless of the future.”

You could probably add your own bumper-sticker slogan from the right or left to the above. Goebbels was right about repeating a lie often enough. But shouting it hurries the process of dumb acceptance. Here’s an outside hunch: maybe it’s because of the beverages we drink. In an obese nation, glutted by calorie-laden sweets fogging our brains, we become susceptible to brain attacks. Whether it is tea, coffee or Kool-Aid, we imbibe at the cost of our cerebral cortexes. We sip our way to intellectual oblivion. Our behaviors and our belt sizes show it. The promoters have gotten us.

I do not want to waste ink tut-tutting everyone about how dismal public discourse has become. That’s been done to little avail. I want something more. I want a boycott of every advertiser and politician who insults our intelligence by shouting home some point. If we live and die by the velocity of capital speeding through the veins and arteries of the body politic, nothing will grab them like the chest pains of a boycott thrombosis. Imagine the death certificates of whole cable networks giving this cause of death.

Respond with reason. Ask to be shown where “death panels” were ever mentioned in any of the several reform bills initiated in the House. Ask why, if chastity is such a drag, about 20 sexually transmitted diseases are pandemic in the U.S. if sex as recreation is such a great idea. But don’t expect to win any rational arguments unless you bring a bullhorn to make your point.

The attitude of crude has been given too much latitude. Free speech does not mean flea-brained screech. Shout radio and TV and blogs and twitters should be shown out. If enough of us protest in the language such offenders can understand, maybe things will become more civilized with a civility all sides can appreciate.