<font color=Red>Lawdog: I read the article you suggested on the "RUMOR" about Katherine Harris. It was so interesting that I checked the box for "other articles" by the author. Here is a good one.
newyorkobserver.com
Al’s Screwy Scrawlings Can’t Pass for
Intelligence
by Ron Rosenbaum
Like many people, I’m just furious at Al Gore for the way
he’s blowing this election. At this point, even if he bumbles
through and wins it, he’s lost me. I mean, I’d vote for the guy
over George W.–I do think there is a difference. But one thing has become clear:
In running the most stupid and inept Presidential campaign in modern history,
making what should be a runaway victory (given this economy) too close to call
with less than a week left, the difference is not intelligence.
I think it’s time to abandon the universal conventional wisdom that it’s Bush the
lightweight airhead versus Gore the heavyweight intellect. Yes, George Bush is a
lightweight–but Al Gore is a heavyweight intellect in much the same way that Alec
Baldwin is a heavyweight intellect (in fact, in exactly the same way). Al Gore is the
D.C. equivalent of that oxymoronic phenomenon, the Hollywood intellectual:
someone who reads a couple of books of lit-ra-chure in a town where everyone
else in effect reads "coverage," and who thereby elevates himself in his own mind
to deep-thinker status.
If George W. Bush is a lightweight, Al Gore is a deep lightweight: deep on the
surface, profoundly shallow down below.
He is just so irritating and, frankly, ridiculous in his clownish pretensions to being
an intellect. His is the kind of intellect that parrots whatever cyber-sophistry is
dressed up in the livery of au courant sophistication by phony futurists,
M.I.T.-media-lab-type gurus, Tom Peters—type management theory shills and
snake-oil Internet "visionaries." Al Gore is the kind of intellect who studied hard
and tested well, but never learned how to think for himself beyond mimicking the
pretentious formulations of others.
Al Gore gives intelligence a bad name. Al Gore is the Emperor’s New Brain.
Deep down inside, he’s Dan Quayle. Mr. Quayle had a brainy adviser in Bill
Kristol, who occasionally ventriloquized him into a simulacrum of seriousness. Al
Gore had the estimable Martin Peretz, whose heroic efforts over virtually a lifetime
have failed to ignite in his dummy any spark of intellectual independence or
creative thought.
And sadly, the dummy’s strings seem to be pulled now not by Mr. Peretz but by a
new "brain trust": true intellectual charlatans of the aforementioned New Economy
futurist variety.
I’m going to get into the new Gore cyberbabble brain trust in a moment, but I want
to emphasize that I make these comments from more than a superficial observation
of Vice President Gore’s hideous, condescending performance as a candidate,
which, of course, is predicated on the delusion that the masses are too stupid to
understand the great elevated thoughts that flicker through his cortex; that the "little
people" must therefore be spoken to very slowly in words of one syllable–which is
why the electorate despises him (even those who will vote for him), and why he’s
turned a sure thing into a loser or, at best, a squeaker.
But as I say, my sense of his fathomless mediocrity comes from more than just
what you see on TV; it’s from my own horrified but fascinated study of the mind
of Al Gore, as it expressed itself in several salient extended print interviews in
which he was particularly eager to impress us all with the wonder that is Al Gore’s
brain.
There was the one with Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker, in which he
disgorged half-digested, barely literate notions on metaphor that he’d absorbed
from what Gore made sound like an insufferably pretentious D.C. seminar on
metaphor and meaning. It sounded like a very Hollywood-intellectual kind of
gathering, from which he’d extracted some incredibly vapid pronouncements
(complete with childlike diagrams) in an attempt to impress his interviewer. The
diagrams were necessary because it was all, like, just too heavy to express in
words, man. It transcended the limitation of the merely verbal.
Many of you probably saw that foolish–and really rather scary–performance in The
New Yorker. Scary because it demonstrated an utterly unfounded belief that he can
run the country based on this deeply meretricious facsimile of intelligence.
But I suspect that many readers of The Observer did not get a chance–as, alas, I
have–to study the mind of Al Gore in his interview with the awestruck editors of
Red Herring, the e-commerce cyber bible. The one in which Mr. Gore disclosed
how deeply he is in thrall to the cyberbabble of the dimwit futurists whose
appalling stew of half-baked ideas he parrots with the uncritical reverence of
slow-witted Lenny for his pal George in Of Mice and Men ("Tell me about the
future, George, willya, willya?").
Appalling because he seems utterly unaware of how dehumanizing, ahistorical and
just plain foolish the notions he’s promoting about American democracy are.
Appalling in his shameless attempt to suck up, in a condescending way, to what he
evidently believes is his historically illiterate cyber audience.
Consider this exchange from the Red Herring interview, which is entitled "E-Gore"
(come to think of it, doesn’t that actually read as Igor, the dimwitted assistant to
the mad scientist in schlocky Frankenstein flicks? Was this a subtle attempt by the
editors of the Red Herring to express how truly clueless Mr. Gore is? Probably
not, if you examine the mutual sycophancy in this exchange):
"Gore: The secret of America’s success is to be found in our revolutionary decision
to place our bets on the abilities inherent in all of the individuals who make up our
country. Our democracy, our constitutional framework, is really a kind of software
for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The
American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
"J.P. and P.H. [Excitedly]: Napster! This is good, this is good, keep going."
Let’s just pause here, because I think we can safely say that this is the signature
moment of Al Gore’s intellectual charlatanism. Forget for a moment the
transparent calculation behind his use of Napster, which had the interviewers from
Red Herring practically creaming in their jeans. Oooh, Napster–he said Napster!
The actual Vice President and maybe President said Napster! Sooo cooool, dude.
Actually, let’s not pass over the Napster reference. Consider the fact that Vice
President Gore’s so eager to score points for his cyber coolness that he just glides
over any ethical or artistic questions raised by Napster. For instance, the fact that,
from the point of view of some artists, it’s a way for non-creative people to pick
the pockets of creative artists by cyber shoplifting. But of course, Gore wouldn’t
care about that in his eager-beaver rush to suck up to Red Herring; it’s precisely
because Al Gore lacks creativity, or even the concept of creativity, that he can so
cavalierly toss Napster around (as if he were just, like, so totally with it, man) in a
pathetic effort to ingratiate himself with the cyber crowd. If he thinks shoplifting is
so cool when it’s done in cyberspace, perhaps he should come out against the
prosecution of inner-city kids caught shoplifting a CD from a Virgin megastore.
Why privilege the privileged shoplifter? The question answers itself. Because he’s
been so insulated by privilege, and by people eager to see him as a big-deal futurist
thinker, that nobody has the courage to say the Emperor’s New Brain is empty.
But setting aside the Napster reference, there is something far more deeply
offensive about the way he extends the computer-processing metaphor: a habit of
mindless abstraction that fails to illuminate a single thing, but instead dehumanizes
and depopulates all of American history in order to jam it into the Procrustean bed
of his cyber metaphor. Some further quotes and comments in this puerile vein:
"Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization…."
(Too bad you were absent the day they distributed real intelligence, Al.)
"Just as you saw the progressive switch from central processing units to massively
parallel supercomputing, our democratic system made it possible for the average
citizen to participate in the decision-making of this nation by processing the
decision-making directly relevant to him or her in an individual congressional
district or state. Then, in the process of biennial or quadrennial elections, our
process harvests the sum total of those decisions and uses it as a basis for guiding
the nation."
This is what I mean by dehumanizing. He exalts the abstract metaphor which turns
voters–that is, human beings–into "processing units" because he prefers to think of
them as manipulable cyphers in cyberspace. Beyond that, it’s a ludicrously
Pollyanna-ish vision that exalts the processing process over actual human
outcomes. All this lovely processing produced a century of votes for slavery in the
South. But hey, what’s a few slaves to someone operating at the heights of our
metaphor man?
Then he tells his rapt Red Herring audience: "Now let me take the metaphor to a
slightly higher level." (Fasten your seatbelts–Al Gore is gonna take you on a trip,
man. A wild ride into the ever-more-stratospheric heights of his mind.) And what
do we find on this "higher level"? Marshall McLuhan! I swear, Al Gore is still
quoting, with uncritical reverence, the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan as if it were
freshly-minted revelation:
"Look at how this transformation played out in history in relation to new iterations
of commonly available technology. The print revolution–or as Marshall McLuhan
called it, ‘the Gutenberg Galaxy’–distributed an enormous amount of civic
information widely throughout national language groups and helped to focus the
definition of the nation-state.… Now, computer networks multiply by manyfold the
amount of information available to the average citizen, thereby empowering the
average citizen to play a larger role" (empowering the average citizen to download
more child porn and neo-Nazi propaganda, too).
By this point, even the Red Herring editors have had enough of this pap, and try
to interrupt the torrential flow of bullshit dressed up as deep-think. But they can’t
stanch the flow. Like recently spewed molten volcanic lava, it finds another
path–it’s unstoppable, unquenchable. Not content to express his brilliance in mere
words (so linear!), which do not do justice to the dimensionality of his brain, Al
Gore breaks into diagram. And we meet–The Bagel.
Ah, yes, the bagel. Nowhere can the stunningly pathetic superficiality of Al Gore’s
intellect be glimpsed more graphically than in his diagrams, and nowhere as
disturbingly and foolishly as in his bagel diagram, the one he drew for the
awestruck editors of Red Herring. Disturbing because Gore claims that the bagel
diagram best expresses his vision of how his Presidency will operate. The bagel
diagram was one of four that he drew for the Red Herring editors, one of which
was an incredibly simple-minded and facile attempt to illustrate Ilya Prigogine’s
complexity theory. Al Gore is evidently very proud of himself for citing Prigogine’s
theorem, although his rendition of its relationship to political systems resembles
nothing so much as the bogus-science sophistry ridiculed in the famous Alan Sokal
Social Text hoax.
But Mr. Gore’s explication of the bagel diagram and its relation to Presidential
leadership is matchless in its ratio of pretension to vapidity: "I think the role of
president can best be defined in the year 2001 in precisely the way I defined the
role of a modern CEO in a high-performing learning organization: the CEO imparts
vision, goals, values. The CEO of an organization stands at the center of an
organization, yet an organization encounters change at the edge [draws bagel
diagram]. In a two-dimensional model, if you have an organization moving along a
plane and encountering change, the point of contact with change is typically at the
edge, and in that metaphor, the CEO would be equidistant from all types of
change. Now if, on the other hand, this information processing sector has been
pre-empowered with the organization’s vision, the shared set of goals, and shared
values, and asked to make a decision in real time, the decision is likely to be the
same decision as the CEO would make."
Here then is the bagel diagram that encapsulates the "wisdom" in this blather:
Notice that the C.E.O.–or President in Gore’s vision–is represented as a hole! A
void, an emptiness. An unintentional self-portrait, perhaps. I’m not saying Al Gore
is utterly empty-headed. But he lacks a critical intellect, he lacks the tragic sense of
life that an exposure to literature (as opposed to management-guru futurist tomes)
might have given him. He is just utterly, uncritically reverent in spewing forth this
second-rate, simple-minded organization-theory crap. He lacks the most basic
discernment that would allow him to see the totalitarian mind-control implications
of his bagel-diagram organization theory. Basically, what it’s really saying is that, in
this model–in Al Gore’s model of the ideal Presidency–everyone lower down in the
hierarchy (everyone on the periphery of the bagel) must be programmed to think
and react just like the hole–excuse me, just like the C.E.O. at the center. Everyone
will be a little clone, a Mini-Me of Al Gore. His bagel model, with all its
cutting-edge rhetoric about parallel processing, doesn’t allow in the slightest for
creative thought, for individuation at the periphery where change is encountered. It
is, rather, a model of thought control.
But he’s so infatuated with this futurist management-theory crap (because it’s
dressed up with super-cool cyber metaphors), and he so lacks the ability to think
critically about it, that he can’t even see what he’s really saying. His brain is like an
empty vessel–a hole–that can be filled up with any old crapola as long as it is
clothed with the aura of deep-think.
Perhaps the best way to express the scary vapidity of this sort of mind is with a
diagram of my own, my visual rendition of Al Gore’s brain. (At left.)
Why am I so angry with Al Gore? Why can’t I resist ridiculing him? Do I really
think he’s stupid? No, not in the sense of low I.Q.; but yes in the sense of
functional stupidity. He’s stupidly, inexcusably blowing an election that, with the
best economy in American history, should have been a cakewalk. He’s blowing it
because he’s too stupid to find a way to make the economy the issue (It’s still the
economy, stupid!), too stupid to convince the voters that record prosperity and
record low unemployment are at stake with his opponent’s reckless, feckless tax
and Social Security plans.
Although he should be focusing the electorate’s attention on the fact that the
record-breaking economy is in peril from George W.’s trillion-dollar tax cut and
trillion-dollar Social Security privatization scam, Al Gore’s either too terrified or too
vain, because to do so would entail associating himself with Bill Clinton. So
instead, whenever he’s asked about the economy of the past seven years, he
mouths something about how "we’re gonna do better" and–gag–"you ain’t seen
nothin’ yet." In other words, what’s happened during the Clinton administration is
inconsequential compared to what Al Gore will do. Yeah, right.
And so Mr. Gore and all his overpaid advisers, all his overrated brain trust, have
flailed about with their pathetic alpha-male makeovers, with their hideously
condescending slogans about "working families" and "our seniors," with that
calculated kiss and his laughable chest-puffing, turf-invading strategy in the third
debate. And they have utterly, miserably, shamefully failed to dramatize the
difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore that could have made this
election a walkover.
And so, just to demonstrate how Al Gore could have won this election with just
one focused TV ad, here is my script for that ad, one that would have guaranteed a
landslide for Vice President Gore if he had blanketed the airwaves with it:
Fade in: A helicopter shot of a powerful American-made automobile cruising
smoothly through winding roads amidst beautiful rural scenery.
Voice-over: "The American economy is like a finely tuned precision engine: Every
part needs to work in sync, every gear needs to mesh smoothly for peak
performance. And for the past seven years, the engine of the American economy
has been running at peak performance, thanks to the hard work of the American
people and the policies of the Clinton-Gore administration. A record number of
jobs, the lowest unemployment in memory, welfare rolls way down, low interest
rates, record home ownership and retirement accounts, no more deficits and
technological innovations that are changing the face of the world economy as well."
Exterior: a gas station. The car pulls up to the pumps. A mechanic comes out, a
slick-looking dude in overalls with the logo "G.W.B." visible on them.
Man behind wheel of car: "Fill ’er up and check the oil, please."
Mechanic (opening the hood and gazing in): "I wanna try somethin’ here. Got me a
plan."
The Mechanic proceeds to start ripping out wires and yanking out parts, then
wheels a barrel labeled "Snake Oil" out to the car, jams a huge funnel into the
engine and starts pouring it in, slopping the oil over the sides and onto the innards.
Man behind wheel: "Hey, wait a minute. Do you know what you’re doing?"
Mechanic: "No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."
Voice-over: "George W. Bush’s reckless tax scheme will wreck our finely tuned
economy, put your job, your savings and our future in danger. Don’t risk what
we’ve all worked so hard for."
Election over. Landslide. I guarantee it. We probably don’t need the Holiday Inn
Express line (I’m just a big fan of the ads). We could just have him say "This is the
way my daddy fixed things." But you get the point. Only Al Gore doesn’t get the
point. He hasn’t come close to articulating, to focusing this argument. His brain is
too full of New Age nonsense, bogus futurism and preening self-approbation to
make the argument that would guarantee a victory and save the Supreme Court for
a generation. And now it’s probably too late. You’re an idiot, Al Gore. |
