Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Nonsense. Go out and grab that TV audience and things will be better
> > than if you had remained isolated.
> >
> > Todd
> >
(Let's take this independently of the ongoing sniping between me and Doug.)
First a fact: The enemy owns, and will _always_ own the TV stations. Were it possible in theory for leftist voices to "grab the TV audience" it would remain impossible in fact because that TV audience would never be informed of the existence of those voices, which would remain trapped on videocassettes and available only to audience specially recruited to view them. That recruitment could not, of course, be by TV. It would have to be mostly recruitment by direct one-to-one relations. That is how it has always been on the left; that at least will remain so in the future.
Secondly, Reagan and _all_ bourgeois politicians use an invisible jargon in which the public has been trained by the totality of our culture. The language belongs to them, not to us, and whatever we say will either (a) be intterpreted with _their_ meanings or (b) seem strange, "jargonish," opaque, counter-intuitive. Chomsky has focused on this from the beginning. "The US military action to arrest Noriega was a terrorist attack on Panamanian people." Nothing abstractly difficult about that language, and it is easy enough (if someone will sit still for, say, 20 minutes listening to the recitation) to provide the facts -- but the proposition is fundamentally unintelligible, because in the language of public discourse (the language used by Reagan & the Washington Post and even, for the most part, by the _Nation_) combining "US" and "terrorist" is a misuse of words. By definition the U.S. is for peace and liberty and freedom, and that definition cannot be violated by any rhetoric.
Now this barrier of language _can_ be broken through in one-to-one (or very small group) extended conversation. I have done it myself many times over the last 37 years. BUT . . .
There are about 20 different directions to go from here (and all of them have to be followed, and followed in such a way that eventually they are all followed at once), but I'll stop for now.
>
> that presumes that you can appeal to people without pandering to them.
> apparently, some people don't think that's possible.
No, it's very possible. But leftists have to do that in an entirely different framework from that in which the DP & the RP work. (In fact left discourse that panders to people as Reagan or for that matter McGovern is self-defeating. No one listens.) And the first great difference between their framework and ours is that theirs exists, while we have to create ours by out actions before we can speak to anyone within it.
(Rough Draft of Paragraph 1 of a 10,000 paragraph unwritten document)
Carrol
> j