Northern Valley Beacon

Web logs are not suitable places for posting complex sentences or associative paragraphs that pose ideas from varying perspectives. And they sure as hell are not places for irony. Electronic media have a deleterious effect on coherence. They are more designed to condition brain cells into performing predetermined tasks than they are posing ideas in relation to other ideas. I keep forgetting that. Until, that is, I see things I have written parsed out into isolated quotations where the text is removed from the context. Such is the hazard of web logs. They simply are not instruments of coherence.


The blogosphere is a Skinner box. A Skinner box is a device into which white rats are placed and trained to do tasks. When they do the tasks properly, they are rewarded with food. When they do them improperly, they get jolt of electricity in the ass. A Skinner box is an operant conditioning device. For the most part, so is the electronic media. They are more about getting you to buy things than getting your brain cells into a self-generating mode.

What occasions these remarks on how media shapes messages are the responses to the previous post which posits that winning elections is not as important as keeping alive our last best hope. ("Last best hope" is Lincoln's description of the the role America plays in world history.) Some responses are available on blogs. Others came in through e-mail. Some acknowledge the context of the post. Most don't. There is a great deal of bipartisan agreement that Newquist's contention that winning elections is not of primary importance in politics is nuts. Well, yes it is nuts. From a political perspective.

Let me see if I can recap the point in blogese. Some commentators have expressed puzzlement at the people selected for the organizing and communications jobs that the DNC is paying for at SDDP. Others of us are just as puzzled, but expect that introductions and explanations will be forthcoming. I expressed some interest in the fact that Republican commentators seem more interested in who the new hires are than Democrats are. And then I noted that Republican commentators are not at all reticent about telling Democrats what they have to do to win elections. I did not ask why the Republicans want Democrats to win elections, but the question is implicit in the situation. Also implicit in the situation is the question of whether Republicans would give Democrats valid advice on winning elections. I mean, if it is all about winning, why would you give advantages to the opponents? Or could it be that the Republicans are telling Democrats how to be Republicans? That they are telling Democrats to drop those positions that oppose Republican stances? Of course, they are.

I also pointed out in the post and in previous ones that Democrats are also discussing what they have to do to win, and this discussion often addresses the issue of what the blue party has to do to get votes from the red party. Some conclude that to win elections you have to reconcile with and adopt red party values.

Here essentially is my point. As Christ said, what does it profit a man to win the world and lose his soul? My question is, what does it profit a political party to win elections if it compromises away its reason for being to do so? What difference does it make if the Democrats win elections if they have betrayed their identifying principles? I say it is more important to keep alive the liberal values than merely to obtain political power.

Those liberal principles, which no one articulated better than Lincoln, are expressed in the New Testament. They are expressed in the words of Christ under the rubric "Judgment of Nations," Matthew 25:31 following.

People like to see the political parties they support win. But when the political parties they support no longer represent their values, they will look for people to represent them who represent their values.

I was involved in the last campaign and saw Tom Daschle portrayed as a cohort of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. I read an advertisement signed by John Thune that called Tom Daschle a wife dumper. I saw the damage it caused his family. I saw the silliness over a house in D.C. that is modest compared to some being built in Aberdeen by those who protested the Daschles Beltway ostentation. I saw the political process brought down to the level of degraded insult, abuse, and personal attack irrelevant to any democratic value. I was there when the word came down that the Daschle campaign would not respond in kind--even if it meant losing the election. We lost the election. But integrity and the dignity of principle survived. And if necessary, that integrity and dignity can be carried to a different party.

That is exactly what Lincoln did when the Whigs began to waffle on essential issues of freedom, justice, and equality.

And thanks to those, in response to a previous post, who e-mailed me pictures of cameltoes. I still says it is a real stretch to make the resemblance. We don't even agree on that.