RB 8/22

By posting on this blog I am contributing to commentary’s supplantation of authority. I am no authority, and yet the things I post may appear in the google-search results of people looking for authoritative answers.

Whatever I post has been filtered through interpretation – not empirical data, not years of scholarly research, and rarely eye-witness account. I’m no historian, though I draw historical parallels to the present. I’ve never read a US Supreme Court opinion written by a sitting justice, though I assume which members I like based on the president who appointed them. (Justice John Paul Stevens is an exception.)

This becomes especially problematic when coupled with mass distribution. The consequences of which include ignoramuses selling themselves as experts and then influencing entire voting bases. Today, with blog posts like this one, it is more possible than ever for such people to gain stature.

It’s frustratingly difficult to nail down authority, to sift through the information motivated by greed and self-interest in order to find the definitive truth – the truth that "is out there.” Bill O’Reilly works out of a “no spin zone”; Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness.” Fox is “Fair and Balanced”; Al Franken used the same term as a subtitle for his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

Commentary’s okay, but I want the truth, too. Except when I’m lazy, which is most of the time. Then I just want to be entertained and told the way things are by someone I trust. Some people trust Focus on the Family to help them decide for whom to vote. Some trust The Daily Show, the self-proclaimed “most trusted source in fake news.” Authority becomes as hard to track down as a copy of an out-of-date text book (ENG374 reference). Much of the commentary that I make is based on commentary that someone else has made. I want the truth, but commentary’s just a click away.

My blog posts will all be spin. I’m the product of what some label the liberal elite, another foot solider in academia’s battle to kill babies, let the terrorists win, eradicate God from our culture, and soil the sanctity of marriage with man sex and woman-on-woman action. I spin. But for O’Reilly’s salary I’d say that I don’t.

By posting on this blog the most I hope for is entertaining the reader and acquiring his or her trust. And, above all else, acing this class and putting it on my transcript.