It is required by law in the State of Missouri that any native born resident telling a long windy must reference Mark Twain. You can look it up in the state statues if you don’t believe me. It’s there in between the car licensing property tax irritation guide and requirements for legal beaver fur trading.
Mark Twain with his corncob pipe, bushy eyebrows, and bristly handlebar mustache, wore white after Labor Day. He put the R in rascal. A classic example: his famous line from Tom Sawyer was “we had an evangelist come through town that was so good Huck stayed saved till Tuesday.” Twain was a man of heart reaching out to his nation. His works like Tom Sawyer changed the conversation about racism. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn helped heal wounds of the damaged country. He had a way of storytelling, a way of presenting an argument to win for the good. When discussing political, social, or technological struggles was heated. Twain answered cool.
The wisdom of Twain’s wit aptly applies to the modern 24-hour news cycle; there was a political pundit expert on “Meet the Press” so good viewers believed him till Tuesday. Skilled talking heads in the media have a method of picking on the person or idea, a flaw then, and develop a hook out of. The hook is how they get their viewers to keep watching. Problem is it’s all hooks. There’s no substance to any conversation. It’s a major media blood sport skewering an individual with database archives and the team of practiced hookers.
Journalistic schools teach the Tiger in the Lilly process of getting viewer’s attention. If a viewer would walk into an enormous field of lilies, a beautiful valley of flowers. They would look at the flowers only. But if one Tiger walked out into the field. All eyeballs would stare at the Tiger, forget looking at any of the lilies. Big media capitalizes on that characterization of human nature and they put a tiger in the Lilly field as often as they can. The second half of the strategy is the new power. What they don’t tell you, the bear is not there. The bear is not there strategy allows the media to hide the real dangers and calculate. If they all don’t tell you about the bear, everyone’s going to think it’s not there.
Recent polling shows that only 26% of the American people believe the media. Another corresponding poll shows that 26% of Americans never watch the news. Although scientists say correlation does not result in causation but I’m thinking there’s a connection here.
Remember that tall kid that when he got surrounded by smaller kids, he figured out he can hold the candy above their head or the ball just out of their reach? Little kids jumped, begged. He had in his hands but only because he was taller. They never could get it. Well, that kid grew up and someone put them on TV, gave him a microphone and a big paycheck for getting up so early. It’s a hard job.
We still face those “kids” in arguments today with the sustainable energy economy. Politicians know it’s a hot button, “issue”. Lobbyists know energy is a major big dollar industry; fortunes can be lost or gained in the disruption. Both know screwing it up as much as possible makes them money. Big media LOVES it.
So here we are waiting for the infrastructure bill. Much needed to implement expansion of electric charging stations all across the US. They know we want it; know we need it. But the complete process seems to move slower than turtle mode on a Nissan leaf. It all sounded good and got everyone excited, signing up for Charge Point. The facts are, it’s still hard to publicly charge a vehicle moving across the US, unless it’s a Tesla.
On the other side of the aisle, we got a group of people that want to drill us dry. Squeeze the oil out of earth liked the sperm whale. Future generations can find energy for themselves. They can figure out their OWN energy solutions, because it is never really a problem if you give it to somebody else.
Each side is working everyone up on two diametrically opposed issues, and both by have each other by the nose.
The country needs a new monkey wrench to tighten the loose nuts and loosen the tight nuts on both ends of the conversation. Today’s communication battles are fought by yelling at each other through a camera. These current methods of solving problems aren’t working. We all could use Mark Twain about now.