The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — They say time flies when you’re having fun.
Of course that has become a cliché.
The Roman poet Virgil first alluded to this phenomenon in Latin, in Georgics Book 3, using the line “fugit inreparabile tempus” which means, in proper English, “time escapes and is irretrievable.”
English poet, translator and satirist Alexander Pope referred to the idiom in the poem “Messiah” when he wrote “… swift fly the years.”
English playwright, poet and actor William Shakespeare used a version of it in the poem A Lover’s Complaint, using the line “the swiftest hours, observed as they flew…”
Chances are these days, people don’t care about such things, unless they are posted on Facebook as a meme. Such is the devolution of human brain power in the era of social media, when a 144 character Twitter tweet and a 12 second TikTok video has replaced “deep thoughts” about anything.
But that’s NOT going to stop me from writing about it.
Friday night while I was flipping through the channels on broadcast television and stopping periodically on NBC to catch some of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, watching the amazing skiers fly down a snow covered hill at up to 70 mph, some things dawned on me.
At the same time, I was conducting some online research looking for quotes from the writers John Muir, who is largely responsible for founding the National Park Service and the Sierra Club, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who published Muir in a magazine he founded, The Atlantic.
It dawned on me that the month of February marks the eighth anniversary of the New American Journal, when I first traveled to Washington, D.C. and launched this online publication.
OK so we don’t have the long history to brag about like The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts.
But if you think about it, what you might discover is that just in the past eight years, I’ve published far more articles here than Emerson and Muir together published in their entire lifetimes, and much of it is far more informed than anything they wrote, by virtue of the fact that science and human knowledge are far more advanced now.
If you take the time to go back and read some of Muir’s writing, you will see how he bragged about all the books he read in his time.
This reminded me of my trip to the Library of Congress in 2018, when I scanned through some of Thomas Jefferson’s personal book collection on display there.
It was an impressive collection for its time, sure.
But it is dwarfed by all the books published since and collected in the rest of that library, and it is dwarfed even more by everything published online since 1994 when the public_html folder was invented, which allowed writing to be published on the web and read over the internet in a web browser like Netscape.
In Jefferson’s day, and even in Muir’s and Emerson’s time, it might have been possible to read pretty much everything published of note in one person’s lifetime, by candlelight no less.
Those days have flown. They’re long gone.
And it seems many people are fine with that, content to scan the memes on Facebook and catch their favorite TV shows on cable or a streaming service like Netflix.
Is it any wonder that people seem to be far more susceptible to manipulation by misinformation than ever?
Sure, people have long been vulnerable to the scams of snake oil salesmen and schisters, written about with great wit and eloquence by Samuel Clemons in the time of Mark Twain, when Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn played their own parts in fooling the families along the Mississippi River of their pocket change and gold.
But none of that can compare to the manipulation of people today by the likes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his American friend, Donald Trump, and all their followers in today’s Republican Party and on Fox News.
“Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?” Tucker Carlson recently asked.
James Carville, taking a break from Mardi Gras for an interview on Vox, said he was mystified about the Trumpified Republicans. “If there’s one thing we were kind of united about, it was that you couldn’t trust the Russians,” he said. “Now people on Fox are pulling for the Russians. Go figure.”
Maureen Dowd also wrote about this for Saturday’s New York Times.
The only way I know how to counter that is to get up every day and share on social media the most accurate and reliable news being produced, and to work as hard as possible to produce as much news writing as I can manage to help people understand the complicated and screwed up world we live in now.
I take heart every day when people let us know they too are interested in keeping this idea alive, many supporting it. Maybe together over time we can counter the lies, disinformation and propaganda that threatens to unravel our attempt to keep democracy alive and cling to some semblance of keeping the planet livable for Homo sapiens for future generations.
It’s going to take a mass movement from the grassroots to keep these ideas alive.
Now I will leave you this Sunday morning with a shocking quotation. Think about it.
“When the last printing press is crushed and sold for scrap, and the last book is burned, we will still be here on a web server somewhere that people can search for and find over the internet.”
And yes, time flies. Especially where you’re having fun. So let’s get to it.
#CodgerPower
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