Have we been thinking about the Dean Legacy incorrectly?
In my previous entry, I asked, “Will any of the campaigns in 2008 or 2012 show the sort of bold courageous leadership necessary to have a campaign that is of, by and for the people?” It reflects the way people seem to be thinking about the question, “what is Dean’s legacy on upcoming campaigns?” Maybe that isn’t the question we need to be asking at all.
Whenever I heard Gov. Dean tell people, “You have the power”, my mind always went to that scene in The Life of Brian, where Brian tells the crowd, “You are all individuals” and everyone responds as if by rote, “We are all individuals”. Too often, I attended Meetups where people talked excitedly about “having the power” and then asking the folks around them what they were supposed to do with that power.
In 2003, Gov. Dean spoke out against the trend in media consolidation, and some say led to the media attacking him by drastically overplaying the “Dean Scream”. The media consolidation has only gotten worse since then with yet another blow to a diverse media being delivered yesterday by the FCC.
Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films illustrates the danger of excessive media consolidation. We need a new media ecology, a media ecology where discussions about the future of our country are not controlled by large corporate conglomerates, and perhaps that is where we find one of the most important aspects of the Dean Legacy.
How many of you are coming to this site, because you found out about alternative digital media sources during the Dean campaign? How many of you have started creating your own media with comments here, diaries on DailyKos, blogs of your own, and pictures and videos posted online?
We can be the new media. We can do it without a presidential candidate or a Meetup leader telling us what to do. We can express our own opinions, report the news as we see it and listen to others doing the same. Sure, it may take a while before a new citizen driven digital media overtakes the old corporate owned broadcast media, but as Gov. Dean told us, “you have the power.”
How shall we fuck off, oh Lord?
December 20, 2007 7:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Welease Bwian!
December 20, 2007 7:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Umm, none of us? Yeah, none of us is about right. I think it's fair to say that none of the people on this site use it because of the Dean campaign.
See, back before the universe beg--I mean back before the Dean Campaign--there was this series of tubes that people used to "communicate" with each other. I think it was called the "webernets" or something very close to that. I could be wrong. And on the webernets, people read things called "sights" for information. I think they were called "sights" because you would look at them on the visual display of your microcomputing machine--a modern marvel that is very similar to a typewriter or a sewing machine.
After a while, some people noticed that creating a "sight" wasn't that hard and they started to make their own very simple sights where they would write about their own lives or experiences. For some reason lost to history, they started calling their personal sights "blogues." While historians disagree, the most widely held belief is that the word is a combination of "bloviate" and "guess"--two of the most extensively employed methodologies in punditry.
It is rumored that the original "blogue" was created by accident as one person's digital journal. It seems that instead of keeping a diary by hand, someone had decided to write their journal in microsoft Word. But one night a great storm blew up. Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled and as electricity arced between two rabbit ear thingies, the Word document was transmitted to the webernets.
At the time, it wasn't called a "blogue." That term would only develop later when the general population realized that an individual's life is pretty damn boring and everyone started writing about politics.
In any case, it's good to remember that the webernets existed before the Dean campaign.
December 20, 2007 8:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dean actually corrupted the medium since he kept changing his message until it resonated with the people. Most of the deaniacs probably didn't realize that he was using them and, behind their backs, Dean was laughing with his friends that people could be so easily conned and misled about his character.
To boldly go...
December 20, 2007 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is what politicians do - change their message until it resonates.
God damn them for wanting to get elected!
December 20, 2007 10:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
God damn them for wanting to get elected!
certainly and americans rate congress lower than bush.
it's too bad that americans don't see through the crap before it falls on them...
To boldly go...
December 20, 2007 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Which I somehow find more agreeable than Bush laughing behind our backs with Cheney "Can you believe it, they still don't realize that Jesus lied to us about the weapons of mass destruction."
December 20, 2007 7:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think he said, "Blessed be the cheesemakers." But he kept changing his message until "Blessed be the peacemakers" began to resonate with people who were being oppressed by the bloody Romans. Christ, he must have been laughing up his sleeve at how easy it is for a shepherd to dupe the sheeple.
December 20, 2007 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Appropos the need for a "new media ecology." I agree but it must include more than "new media" like blogs, the internet, etc. For one thing, the blogosphere is so differentiated by ideology and party that the opinioin elites involved wind up talking to one another--which has a lot of benefits to be sure. But we need to reach a mass audience. And all the PO research shows that the mass public in this country is uninformed, politically inert and cynical and is therefore easily misled and diverted by the lies and distortions rife in the MSM, not to mention Faux News and clear channel radio. What we need is our own mass communications network comprising a progressive tv news channel or network and a major national print daily as well as complementary regional and local outlets. We should erect our own countervailing institutions to, e.g., CNN/MSNBC/Fox/CBS/NBC/ABC as well as to the NYT/WP/WSJ/ etc . The hallmark of this network would be its unfailing commitment to factual accuracy and coverage of really significant national issues drawing upon people who actually know something about the topic(s).
Something like this already exists in European media, which features print and broadcast media with an avowed ideological/party orientation as well as more "conventional" commercial organs and objective sources like the BBC.
Such a project would go a long way to corrrect the evident antiprogressive bias in rhe current US mass communications system. Half measures like the (unlikely) restoration of the fairness doctrine cannot deliver the change that is needed.
Perhaps G. Soros, W. Buffet, Rob Reiner, et al would find this a useful investment. The rest of us could support with subscriptions, ads, contributions, etc.
December 22, 2007 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink