Djelloul Marbrook

I’m one of those (rare?) bibliophiles who loves the Internet. I don’t see why the paper and ink book cannot live peaceably with the e-book, serving different purposes. But I admit I’m sometimes unsettled by the amount of trivia people spend their precious time sending each other. My positive take on the phenomenon is that anything in the name of communication is good. But I’m not a cockeyed optimist, just a bit cockeyed in the best of circumstances.

It may be my paranoid imagination as a man of the middle who tends to veer leftward more than rightward but has been known to vote for conservatives that the torrent of right-wing buzz I see on the web shares a common loathing of pesky facts. The left-wing material I see is often far too cavalier and dismissive of conservative ideas. Propagandists of the left often strike me as self-righteous and contemptuous of reality. Propagandists of the right strike me as fearful of discourse and inclined to a Machiavellian use of rumor.

We pay lip service to a republic that cannot survive if we will not listen to each other and compromise. A democracy needs a much bigger ear than mouth, and we have entirely too much mouth. Just watch the cell phonists on the street and in restaurants; you don’t even have to hear them to know they’re talking too much and hearing too little.

What I find most distressing is the deaf posturing, an unwillingness not merely to hear the other person out but to carefully reconsider matters in the clear light of morning. I don’t think a nation of people talking at each other has much of a future as a democratic republic, and I don’t think our current administration thinks so either, which is why it has tried so hard to abridge our civil liberties. Obviously the administration has concluded that the republic is merely an improvised bridge to an oligarchy in which decisions are made in board rooms, not voting booths.

Are they right? Sometimes my e-mail suggests they’re on to something, albeit something thoroughly despicable. My hope, a prayer really, is that the Internet will help us see through propagandistic ideas. Perhaps then it will dawn on us that supporting the troops, that ubiquitous buzz term, doesn’t mean quashing dissent and that the left is as entitled to support the troops with its ideas as the right is with its ideas. Perhaps it will dawn on us there is nothing inevitable in the Clinton machine’s quest for dynasty or any number of other presumptions the press regularly imposes on us.

—DM