With less than two months to go in this hyperbolic and "deplorable" election season, I am burnt out.
Am I alone?
I have spent a great deal of time trying to inform myself about serious issues--racial and religious prejudice, income inequality and class division, environmental devastation and climate change--that define who we are as a society. They will also shape our future-in-the-world. Despite the pressing importance of these issues, we hear little about them in election reportage. Instead, we hear breathless riffs on Hilary Clinton's e-mails and her "failing" heath. Instead, we are witness to the speedy patter-patter of Donald Trump's latest gaffs or the seemingly unending flood of ethical lapses and social offenses.
How can we account for this descent into political melodrama?
The corporate media, which likes speedy returns on investment, is interested in quick news turnarounds--the latest up to the minute reporting in real time. They want the news to be "interesting" and have conditioned their journalists to become "entertainers," who revel in the latest snippet of gossip on the campaign trail--all in quest for better ratings. Accordingly, there is little or no time to slow down and investigate the complex issues that we face in the world.
How about CNN expediently skewing their polling samples to suggest a toss--up election?
That's very good for the fast news cycle that increases ratings and advertising revenues.
How about Matt Lauer's cowardly and sexist "moderation" of the Commander-in-Chief forum? Although Lauer's feckless demonstration of entertainment journalism is anything but a profile in courage, there emerged from his quick and shallow exchanges a great many headlines about Clinton's e-mails and Trump's admiration for Russian President Putin. He says good things about me, Mr. Trump says, so I'll say good things about him--just kind of discourse you find at recess on the elementary school playground.
These fast-paced and shallow stories, like the narratives found on Reality TV, make profits for the corporate media. Profits, of course, are good for business and the proverbial bottom line. Who needs thoughtfulness or thoroughness in the rough and tumble of entertainment news? Quenching its endless thirst for ratings, the corporate media has transformed journalism into a unreflective set of fast-paced exercises. These have dumbed down the 2016 campaign for US President into a series of "he said, she said" arguments that are not worthy of our quadrennial presidential competition.
As I have written again and again, the widely broadcast childish character of contemporary political exchange reflects a larger sociocultural issue in America--the celebration of ignorance. We see examples of such celebration everywhere. People like Donald J Trump, who could become President of the United States, denigrate science and call climate change a hoax. Powerful politicians have quickly and thoughtlessly cut budgets for public education. The once great system of American public higher education is being starved to death.
Is this any what to invest in our future?
In this know-nothing climate many of our citizens have lost respect for knowledge as well as for the people we entrust to convey it to the next generation. Public school teachers, whose pay is shamefully low, sometimes work two or three extra jobs to make ends meet. Some teachers dip into their shallow pockets to buy school supplies that school budgets no longer cover. At the university we teach increasingly large classes--to process studies and "keep our numbers up." At my university, which is part of the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education, the system administrators, who seem to have little or no experience in university classrooms, want to expand the corps of temporary faculty, have them teach more classes and pay them less. They even want graduate students to teach undergraduate courses. These proposals, which are far too common in the American corporate university, demonstrate a profound lack of respect for teaching. "Anyone can teach a college class? "How hard could it be to teach a group of kids about literature or anthropology?
Like the corporate media, the people who run the corporate university value expediency. Many of them like a fast-paced education filled with technological "shortcuts" in which students in large revenue-producing classes receive a fast and superficial education. These days it may be more important to graduate quickly than to learn how to write coherently or distinguish fact from fantasy.
We stand at a crossroads. We can speed forward reaching our destination in record time, but not understanding how or why we got there. Or we can slow down and appreciate the subtle twists and turns of the journey. With fast politics and fast news, we get headlines and a Reality TV star sprinting to "play" President of the United States. With fast education we get a superficially informed public racing after conspiracy theories that often promote religious intolerance, homophobia, and racial and ethnic discrimination.
The Songhay people of the Republic of Niger and Mali have a wonderful saying: "A puddle can never become a pond." Fast politics, fast media and fast education are puddles that will never develop into ponds. For the development of a more perfect union, following this bit of West African wisdom, we need to adopt a slower more inclusive politics, a slower more analytic media, and a slower more thoughtful set of educational values that valorize slow teaching and the gradual development of the mind.
The need for slow politics and slow teaching is not some aimless pie-in-the-sky academic fantasy; it is a quest for greater well-being the world.
To quote from a Grateful Dead lyric: "Speed Kills."