Brutally Honest Rant - 09/12/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Polarization and the Idiot Factor
Audio Transcripts
09/12/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

My friend RJ over at ShockNet Radio was asking recently about why America seems to be so badly polaraized in all sorts of different ways. You have neo-cons, you have Muslim jihadists, you have Christian evangelicals, you have liberal wackos, and you even have extreme atheists. YES, there is such a thing as extreme atheism!

Look in the business world and you have extreme socialists versus extreme corporatists. People who think that everything should be free, versus those who think that everything should be up for sale to the highest bidder. You have people who think that everything should be shared and should be free, and then you have the copyright Gestapo that send out shakedown lawyers to demand money from you for just mentioning a song or a movie.

Everything seems to be zero-sum and extremist. There doesn’t seem to be middle ground for any of it, and nobody seems to even WANT middle ground! There is no compromise.

And it’s all done for a reason!

People have been wondering why conservatives and neo-conservatives have managed to be so damn successful in the field of talk radio. Liberals certainly would like to know why that is because that’s the group that has stymied them for years now. They can’t match the kind of audience that conservatives have been bringing in, and radio stations certainly don’t want to give them a platform if they can’t bring in audiences like that, and they want to know why that is.

Well my friends, I’m going to give you the secret of why CTR – Conservative Talk Radio – has been so damn successful for all of these years. And the strange part is… this is something that the liberals should know, because it’s something they’ve used as well.

The secret is this: they appeal to the idiots in our society!

Now when I say “idiots”, I don’t mean the people who are mentally retarded or are suffering from Alzheimer’s or brain damage. I’m talking about those people who are barely functional in our society, and are so BY CHOICE!

You know these people! You see them every day! Maybe you’re even one of them. These are the people with WAY too much stuff going on at any given time. These are the folks who multitask while driving. They’re talking on the cellphone while drinking their lattes and trying to munch on some French Fries while listening to the radio and driving down the highway… and if something else were to complicate that delicate balance that they love to create, then they’re going to have a REALLY bad day. They may not get hurt… because they love to drive urban assault vehicles… but they WILL have a really bad day because of it.

Now barely functionally people in our society have short attention spans. They have so much going on in their lives that they really can’t formulate long and complicated ideas. This is why they are idiots by choice. They really just don’t have the time to THINK! Everything is action. They’re having to DO things and they don’t have a chance to THINK about them. Thinking is for other people. They expect things to just WORK for them.

There’s also two things about the barely functional that I’ve observed… they don’t like to hear the word “no”, and they certainly don’t want to hear WHY the answer is “no”. They don’t care what it is, they want gratification and they want it now and they will go through hell and back to find someone who won’t tell them “no”. Whoever came up with the business idea that “the customer is always right” obviously never had to deal with these kinds of social idiots. But I digress here…

Something else about the barely functional that needs to be pointed out… many of the barely functional are also parents. That pretty much explains why there are so many barely functional folks around because parenting is a full-time job in and of itself, never mind if you have to work for a living on top of that.

It should be noted, then, that there is no sense of SELF around the barely functional. Parenting, by its very nature, destroys all sense of self, but the demands of the workplace also do that quite well. You’re not a person, you’re a caretaker and a teacher and a babysitter, and, most importantly, you are an employee-slash-account number. Banks, credit card companies, utility services, they all refer to you as a NUMBER, not as a person. Even the federal government knows you only as your Social Security Number.

So now here comes the conservatives, and do you know what they do? They play up on this! The conservatives cater to the barely functional.

They will tell you that once upon a time things weren’t this complicated! Well, yeah, of course they weren’t! WE made them this complicated! But they won’t tell you that part, because they’re trying to coddle you.

They reduce everything to simple Idiotspeak. They point to a church and they say “Let THEM tell you what to think!” They point to conservative politicians and they say “Let THEM make the hard decisions for you!” They point to the police and they say “Let THEM catch and beat-up bad guys!” They point to the FCC and they say “Let THEM babysit your kids!” They point to the military and they say “Let THEM kill the enemy!”

And they HAVE to keep things that simple! Even in their books – which, by the way, writing one is pretty much a requirement for the CTR crowd – everything is designed for the barely functional mentality. This is where they normally would bring in long drawn-out philosophies and detailed stances on subjects. Instead you have anecdotes, you have limited comparisons and abbreviated studies, and you have simplistic statements repeated and rehashed from their broadcasts. This is so they don’t have to constantly repeat the whole thing every week. All they have to do is say “hey, just go buy my book and look at page 693 where I talk about this subject”. Simplistic.

And this is where the polarization comes in. They actually GIVE the barely functional an identity and something for them to identify with. You think like us, you agree with our simplistic statements and our simplistic ideas, so you are one of US. You’re not one of “THEM”… the people who made your life complicated and messed up.

And that’s what they tell people! They tell people that this is really a WAR between “US” and “THEM”. They use war-like phrases and use war-like euphemisms, because THAT is what gets the attention of the barely functional. It’s confrontational, it’s zero-sum extremism, but it WORKS! It gets your attention! It gets people fired up on both sides of the issue! And it’s simplistic enough to be used as sound-bytes, making them GREAT promotional spots, which is another boom for radio and TV broadcasters.

AND not to mention that the simplicity of conservative programming works for the limited timeframe for commercial radio and television broadcasters. Remember folks, the stuff on radio and TV is merely FILLER for their REAL purpose of broadcasting… namely to air advertising! If you have seven minutes between commercials segments, then you talk for maybe three minutes, and then have a bunch of callers call in, and you get to control the callers so the time frame is completely manageable. That’s why broadcast providers LOVE conservative talk radio, because it fits right into their hidden agenda.

Now… what I’m saying about CTR pretty much flies in the face of what the conservatives LOVE to portray themselves as! They LOVE to portray themselves as the voices of REASON, as opposed to the irrational stances of their liberal critics. In TRUTH, however, they’re not the voices of REASON, but instead are the voices of simplicity.

And this is where liberals lose it… because once upon a time they actually HAD that connection. They understood the barely functional. They could relate to the barely functional. And how do I know this? Because THEY were the ones who created the Pavlovian link between tax cuts and class warfare! It really IS Pavlovian too, because all you have to do is say “TAX CUTS” and you have to BITE YOUR TONGUE to keep yourself from immediately blurting out “FOR THE RICH”! It’s absolutely MASTERFUL how they were able to condition the masses to think that! And to DEMONIZE it too!

Rich versus poor… that’s a simplistic concept for the barely functional! That’s the original “us” versus “them” struggle in politics! And who is “the rich”? Well most of us would say that WE AREN’T! Even if we make $100-grand a year, we will still consider ourselves as barely making do. And besides, WE KNOW who “the rich” are! We see them on MTV’s show “Cribs”! Robin Leech will tell us all about them and how they live, and WE certainly don’t live like them, so we aren’t “rich”. That’s the mindset, folks, and the liberals are still able to pull that out every so often.

So the liberals had that connection once upon a time. And how did they lose it? They became too elitist. They’d talk about struggles with the poor and then go home to their mansions. They would hang around power players and Hollywood stars and elitist scholars sitting on their tenure at universities all across the country. You know, it’s a little hard for the barely functional to agree with someone who talks about struggling to make ends meet and then spends their summers at exclusive resorts with the producers of “The West Wing”.

“No blood for oil!” GREAT slogan that the liberals used any time we would talk about the Middle East. But there’s just one problem… WE NEED OIL! Yeah, it’s easy to say “No blood for oil” if you’re not paying $100 every three days to fuel up your urban assault vehicle. That kind of statement doesn’t sit well with the barely functional. “Kill them all and let God sort them out!” Now THAT’S something that the barely functional can understand!

Let’s get brutally honest here… the GREAT SECRET to conservatives and neo-conservatives has NOT been their righteousness of their causes or the strengths of their arguments, but because they managed to coddle and cater to those who choose to not do too much thinking!

Think about it for a minute… in 2004, John Kerry was seen as an intellectual elitist. He would go windsailing and skiing and do Botox injections. How many of you do those things? George W. Bush would clear brush at his Texas ranch, getting around in his pickup truck… the kind of truck that many of the barely functional are driving themselves to bankruptcy trying to make the payments on. And he CERTAINLY was far from being an intellectual! In fact, he probably would make Barney Fife look like a Rhodes Scholar in comparison. Now you tell me who had the upper hand with the great unwashed?

And extremism works because it gets attention! It stands out amidst all of the other stances and positions.

Plus it does something else… it serves as a poor substitute for individuality. That’s why people become extremists… they feel they’ve lost that sense of self, and they try to find it again through associating with something dramatic. They really want to BE the cause because they don’t know how to BE themselves!

My friend RJ is right to be concerned about the rise of extremism and radical polarization in our society. But the solution isn’t in trying to encourage moderation or trying to find common ground. The solution rests with restoring a REAL sense of individuality. Once that happens, moderation and common ground become second nature.

(Computer – some stuff about television and mind-mush)
(Fade Music In – “Who am I” by Peace Orchestra)

You know we’re all guilty of getting lost in all of the crazy things going on in our lives. I’m just as guilty of this as the next person. But I really have very little sympathy for those who are barely functional in our society… the ones who are idiots by choice, and choose to remain so. It’s one thing to be played. It’s another to put yourself in a position so that you can’t help but be played! I am a supporter of individuality and personal responsibility, and as such you have an obligation to help yourself out instead of relying on others to do that for you.

Of course politicians and special interest groups – including the talk show hosts – don’t want you to hear that. They would rather keep you barely functional. It makes doing their jobs a whole lot easier.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
------------------------------