Brethren, Peace and Good to all of you in Jesus’ Name, before which every creature in heaven, on earth, and under the earth shall bow.
Maybe it is because I’m getting older and more jaded, or perhaps it is because I’m growing wiser, but I find the current political campaign unpalatable, and I’m talking about both the Republican and Democrat campaigns.
Listen carefully to what the candidates say and you’ll discover that, with minor nuances, their speeches are little blurbs of simple sentences, often lacking in transition from one sentence to the next. A sentence, as you know, expresses a thought while a paragraph expresses an idea. A group of ideas follow a theme with a purpose to illustrate and persuade. What we’re getting, though, is a string of disconnected thoughts illustrating vague ideas about economic recovery, the debt, taxation, “progress forward”, “reproductive rights”, military might, diplomatic initiatives, etc. The sniping became acute during the debates, except perhaps the first debate; it was as if the candidates were shooting sound bites at each other. The same is true of the tiresome, trite, political advertisements they bombard us with in “battleground states”: they are short, sweet, and communicate one single idea at a time, yet they lack substance.
What we’re witnessing is an information campaign where the weapons are memes, that is, a unit of communication carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. “Victory” is defined by annihilating an adversary’s memes (E.g.: “I’m better for President because…” “This idea is better for the economy because…” “The other candidate is incapable of doing the job because…”) from the collective consciousness while one’s memes persist longer in the public’s consciousness, thereby influencing their actions, in this case, voting for a given candidate or issue. The meme has to survive long enough in the voting public’s mind, by means of constant repetition in the media until the desired result is achieved, the election of the favored candidate or the approval or disapproval of the given issue.
Also, warriors in this arena are wont to kill competing memes they judge as distracting from the memes. Let me give you an example: Shortly after Romney’s “47% revelation” I twitted a criticism of one of the candidates. Two seemingly independent “twitterers” responded promptly with almost identical ripostes. In the Twitter universe that’s not a coincidence: they both saw what I wrote and responded identically, not because what I said was true or not, but in order to “squash” any possibility that my point would become a persistent meme that would in turn distract others from their memes.
You see, this is no longer about airing different viewpoints and judging them on their merits, but of blocking competing claims as “noise” and feed us only one current of information. Let me give you one last example, the Richard Mourdock's brouhaha regarding his comments about abortion and rape. This is what he said:
“I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” (Source)
What did God “intended to happen”? Was it the creation of new life or the rape”? Therefore Mr. Mourdock fell into the trap of the compound subject and single predicate. I knew he meant the “new life” and not the rape; only a callous misogynist would say or believe that God somehow wishes “rape” to happen. Immediately, the information warriors went into overdrive not because they were seeking the truth, but because they wanted the meme “Mourdock = callous misogynist” to prevail in the public consciousness.
Think about this: which meme did both parties studiously avoid in this faux scandal? I’ll tell you which: life is that gift from God. Democrats flee from such a meme because it undermines their pro-abortion position, whereas Republicans won’t touch it because it would distract from the “it’s the ecomony, stupid” meme. No one wants to deepen their reflection on the truth life is that gift from God, for the policy demands that admitting this truth into the square are too big to contemplate.
Brethren, please vote your consciences this coming election and remember the Five Non-Negotiables. Focus on what will bring real change humane change in our power structures. Forget their memes. Concentrate on the truth. May the Lord bless us all and our country too.