TAKING A NEW LOOK AT GORE
No.
Al Gore has found a new excuse to explain all his woes : Post-Modernism !!!
Gore begins by complaining that he can't get a fair shake out of the media, which mocks and lampoons him ... Mocked and Lampooned by Leno every night, the idea that Gore is as dull as a 2-by-4 eventually becomes part of "the fabric of the zeitgeist" ... (Should anyone ever be elected president who used the word "zeitgeist" in normal conversation ???) ...
Sounding every day more like Chomsky, Gore complains that the media is unserious and not focused on the real issues because it is "financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations" ... Their hired thugs are paid to lampoon him ... Yes, SNL is really part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" ...Endlessly lampooned, a man who would really "fight for the people" is barred from higher office ...
No doubt anyday Gore will take the next Chomsky step ... since media-for-profit allows the "zeitgeist" to be the play thing of "billionaires," media (like medicine) must be socialized by the government and run on a non-profit basis by civil servants totally / selflessly dedicated to the public trust ...
As odd as that sounds, I must add that the first essay George Orwell got a check for writing was a piece for "GK's Weekly" (as in GK Chesterton) on how the billionaires control the media and must be broken / broken up by the government ... In addition to wanting to keep the Fleet Street billionaires' hands off the zeitgeist, Chesterton also used "GK Weekly" to run a crusade against the Cadbury chocolate bar trust (insert your own joke) ...
But the real shocker of Gore's attack on the media that the media is too POST-MODERN :
http://www2.observer.com/observer/pages/frontpage1.asp
For now, Mr. Gore can only attempt to explain what motivates the ceaseless lampooning he continues to face from America's columnists and commentators. "That's postmodernism," he offered. "It's the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism, and that's another interview for another time, if you're interested in it."
Again, as with "zeitgeist," I'm not sure if anyone who knows the word "post-modern" should be allowed to campaign for high office ... These are words that are best treated as abstract jokes ... Like the movie where WC Fields throws around the word "technocracy" for laughs ...
But the more I thought about it, the more I concluded that Gore would be the natural enemy of "Post-Modernism" ...
Here is a nice SHORT description of Post-Modernism :
http://jonmattox.com/grids/ideas/postmodernism.html
Lets look at some of the main points :
PoMo doesn't take itself seriously -- Already it is chaffing against Gore
PoMo is against "grand theory" / "metanarrative" and for "multiple-interpretations-of-the-text" / "schizophrenia"-- "Environmentalism" is nothing is not a "metanarrative" -- all things must be judged by one standard -- how they effect "the earth in the balance" ... In the 80's, scholars would write that America loved Reagan because America was "Post-Modern" and I was amused by the buzzword ... Rethinking those old arguments, now I'm no longer amused, simply convinced ...
PoMo is for a sense of fun -- In a key Post-Modern manifesto, architect Robert Venturi said that people must start "Learning From Las Vegas" -- Can you think of anyone who has learned less from Las Vegas than Gore ???
As the final stage in the crisis of Capitalism, PoMo is for the "inflation of theory" and the "overproduction of artifacts" -- What environmentalist can be for "overproduction" ??? And all that "theory" is just going to mean more landfills ...
In 1979, critic Clement Greenberg, the Patron Saint of AB-EX / the man who made Pollock a household name, said PoMo is "the antithesis of everything he loved" ... "a lowering of aesthetic standards caused by the democratization of culture under industrialism" :
" ... it's an excuse to pile together oodles of wild and crazy decor ..."
Doesn't this sound like the "Bush is Popular because Bush is Stupid" argument ???
No one would ever describe Gore as having "oodles of wild and crazy" anything ... And since the "billionaires" controlling the "zeitgeist" have given America a constant lust for "oodles" of the wild and crazy, I can see why Gore hates Post-Modernism ...
Personally, I want "oodles" of wildness and craziness and so I say, keep the zeitgeist plowing ahead at full speed ...