The Internet and the Ignorant

Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. -Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

The
Internet and talk radio are like magic. They can turn nothing into
something. Not all who use it are magicians, however. Some are simply
hucksters hoping to beguile the gullible into parting with their money
while others are part of a mindless multitude willing to give voice to
anything that comports with their beliefs, even though the fictions
they create or are helping to perpetuate are made up out of whole
cloth.

Examples of the former abound. On September 7th I
received an e-mail notifying me that I had "emerged" a winner of
$2,500,000 on something called "online draws" that were "played on the
year 2009." My good fortune did not end there. Three days later I was
notified that my e-mail address had itself enjoyed success in some
"computer Balloting." Since I own the e-mail address I assume the
benefit ultimately inures to me. It won the relatively paltry sum of
750,000 Euros but if my e-mail's winnings and my winnings are combined
the two of us are relatively well off for at least the next several
months.

My lottery winnings are outpaced in frequency and
amount only by the number of friends I have in Africa who need my
assistance in transferring funds that have been accumulated over the
years by their ancestors-employers-politicians and the like. For my
efforts, which are not terribly taxing, I am rewarded by sharing
handsomely in the transferred funds when the transfer is completed.
These good luck strokes are, of course, illusory and but for the
Internet, could never have been dreamt of. None of us ever received
letters in the mail from Africa asking for our assistance in
transferring money nor, except for the Publisher's Clearing House
Sweepstakes, did we receive notice of winnings in lotteries we did not
know we had entered. The intellectually infirm are, however, a greater
threat to our democracy than the hucksters.

The most
conspicuous example of recent time is the host of wholly mindless
bloggers and talk radio people who insist that the president was not
born in the United States. Before the advent of talk radio or the
Internet such nonsense would not have escaped from the prison of the
narrow minds in which it took refuge. Thanks to the intercession of the
Internet and talk radio, crazy ideas are reported, adopted and
promulgated the world over. They have worked their magic in the debate
over health care.

Although not part of any proposal, the
health care proposals have been portrayed as sanctioning "death panels"
that would, as Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New
York said in a radio interview,
require people in Medicare to "have a required counseling session that
will tell them how to end their life sooner." The proposals provide for
the kind of counseling about advance directives that many thoughtful
individuals consider when contemplating the possibility of incapacity.
Thanks to the Internet and talk radio, however, the fiction of a death
panel is now firmly established as being part of health care reform.

A group supporting health care reform known as "Organizing for America" has as its logo a symbol about which Rush (whose facility with words easily outstrips his facility with thought)
says: "Obama's got a health-care logo that's right out of Adolf
Hitler's playbook."

A chain e-mail that fell into the
hands of Fact Check.org has conducted an analysis of H.R. 3200, the
House health care bill that Fact Check says
shows "evidence of a reading comprehension problem on the part of the
author." According to Fact Check, the author's examination of the first
half of the bill makes 48 claims about the health care bill of which 26
are false, 18 partly true and only 4 accurate. That has not affected
the distribution of the e-mail. According to a report in the Denver
Post the author has sent his analysis to more than 6000 people and they
in turn have forwarded it to thousands more. His analysis, flawed
though it is, became the stuff of town hall meetings and cheat sheets
that were waved about at meetings in order for the participant to
express his or her displeasure with the idea of health care reform. It
is the magic of the Internet that enables a careless or deliberately
deceptive commentator to influence the health care debate now taking
place.

If readers are intent on being deceived by one kind
of magician or another I'd suggest they put their faith in the lottery
folks or the Africans. They harm only the gullible. The others harm the
country and its 46 million citizens who lack health insurance.

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