In only 4,649 words, ex-Presidential wannabe Al Gore manages to link O.J. Simpson, torturing Prisoners of War, Jurgen Habermaas, the decline of print media, and much, much more. Oh, and he manages to plug his television network a few times, too.
Go ahead and give it a read. The text gives the reader a fascinating look at the inner workings of Gore's mind. I, for one, came away with the helpful knowledge that Al Gore is a terrible, horrible, awful, no-good speech-writer.
I could pretty much go through Gore's rant paragraph by paragraph and make both legitimate and completely unfair criticisms of his points. (And occasionally I would even agree with him. Very occasionally.) I won't do that, though. A lunch break doesn't offer the time.
I do want to critique Gore's insistence that "there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear." As evidence, he notes that "Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason." Yeah yeah, "Our Founders" were a literate bunch, and they spoke and wrote pretty darn eloquently by today's standards. But so what? Do the words of a few rich white men prove that communication among the masses was more enlightened 200 years ago than it is today, and that therefore our democracy was far more robust back then? Gore doesn't do anything to prove that the public were any better at participating in government in 1805 than they are today.
I don't really understand Gore's message. Does he want us to abandon television media and return to an age when print media ruled? Well, no. How 'bout the internet? It's a huge, diverse, meritocratic, and mostly uncensored (for now) realm. Gore hardly mentions the internet, except to
say that it sucks because it can't stream video very well. So what's the solution? Gore's own television network, of course! But wait, I thought Gore said that television is bad?
I guess it takes somebody with real nuance, like John Kerry, to figure out what the hell Gore is talking about.
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