If you believe that culture trumps politics that represents a real danger because Hollywood shapes culture. But here we have Hollywood shaping political facts directly.
Paddy Chayefsky should really be writing this or maybe it would make a good episode of Twilight Zone. At any rate, we are watching the theater of the absurd become our culture become our politics.
Maybe so, but given the fact that See-BS fired his butt over this very episode makes me think otherwise.
That paste is out of the tube.
Good to hear from you.
This cries out for a documentary movie on the capabilities of typewriters.Start with Mark Twain trying to develop a typewriter, and on thru the various early mechanical contraptions, the development of the intentionally slow QWERTY keyboard layout, the techniques used to center text, the manual return feed anticipated by the bell to tell the typist when to look for the place to interrupt the current line of text, correction fluid and carbon copies, tab stops and the tab key, special characters and the quasi-superscript th key on some models, etc, etc. Discrete spacing of letters, and of lines of paper feed of the typewriter platen.
Along with the mechanical technologies and limitations, address the cultural aspect of the “typewriter” - as the person who operated the machine was known (at least by Will Rodgers if no one else). Typewriting originally considered off-putting as less personal than handwriting. Typewriting as an opportunity for female employment. Sexism and white/blue collar distinctions in the relation of the composer of text to the operator of the typewriter. And, finally, the distortion and noise effects of 2004-era fax and photocopying - and the implications for confidentiality which the existence of a multigenerational copy entails.
It is only in the context of all of that that the contrast between the photocopies of Microsoft WordTM “TANG" documents and an actual 1972 vintage typewritten document can be seen.
If you know all that stuff, the idea that the “TANG Memos” were made in 1972 is a joke. If you know none of it - if you learned keyboarding in grade school and/or never tried to make a document on a 1972-era typewriter, you would be be susceptible to disinformation about the plausibility of those hoax “memos.”
But I guess what I am saying is that, absent a Dinesh D’Souza documentary movie on the topic, the only way the youngish voter will have those facts presented to them - the only way Hollywood’s propaganda can be defeated - would be a crowd-sourced YouTube documentary.
Somewhere there must be museums which display old typewriters . . .