Our Fashionable Cynicism
by Advocate Staff
It has become intellectually fashionable these days to condemn the media. Ask any true blooded liberal intellectual what they think about the media and you are likely to get a litany of complaints –largely valid– about conservative bias, corporate influence, incompetence, and lousy reporting. What you probably won’t hear, however, and what is perhaps decidedly more disturbing is that for every kitten caught in a tree, for every Geraldo interview, for every Rush Limbaugh, for every biased and stupid article you read in the New York Times, there are a number of publications, writers, and thinkers with wide, and more importantly, influential readerships that have done their best to expose, again and again, the growing levels of corruption, incompetence, and greed in both our government and our culture at large. Jonathan Schell, Seymour Hirsch, Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Katha Pollit, and the inimitable Eric Alterman, to name only a very small handful, have all written wise, extensive, and damning articles about the nature of our nation, our economy, and our current administration. Even the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and NBC have offered a host of irrefutable evidence that our president and his cabinet are largely incompetent, greedy, power hungry, war mongering ideologues. As Chomsky himself has said repeatedly, you don’t have to be Noam Chomsky, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. to figure these things out. It’s all out there for anyone interested in finding out about it. There is plenty of intelligent and accessible media available.
The problem is not that there is too little information available or that the media is too timid or conservative; it is becoming increasingly clear that the problem is in fact too much media. It seems obvious to me that our fashionable cynicism, and by “our” I mean those of us on the left side of the aisle, is a symptom, not of our intellectual hubris, or our uncanny ability for self-reflection, but of our utter fear of admitting that we feel largely powerless in the face of the onslaught of history. And sadly, our fashionable cynicism seems to be fueled by the media.
The more we see corruption without acting, the more we observe incompetence without outrage, the more we passively munch on granola while we watch the bodies of dead children carried through the streets of Baghdad and Beirut, the more likely we are to expect and sadly, to eventually accept these circumstances as simply a symptom of our age.
Our fashionable cyncism tells us that there is truth out there, and that that truth is somehow fixed and immutable, and that at the end of the day, at the end of the broadcast, at its essence, that truth is a reflection of our bad, short, nasty, and brutish lives. Sadly, the truth, for our generation, does not set us free, but leaves us traumatized and without hope. Constructive action, of course, is impossible without hope, and our fashionable cynicism, combined with our 24-hour access to the news of the world, has created a public (including those most likely to make a difference: the most educated of us) largely resigned to things the way they are. We, and by “we” I mean the educated, those “in the know,” accept with resignation that dead Muslims and growing slums are just another casualty of capitalism, that democracy is nothing but an export, that torture and extradition are acceptable tools against terror, and that elections are sometimes stolen, sometimes twice in a row.
Meanwhile, while I write this, Mexican school teachers continue to take to the streets of Oaxaca and the BBC is reporting that as many as 2.5 million people have come out onto the streets of Mexico City to protest their country’s fraudulent election results. These millions of people, many of whom have little access to the kinds of information resources available to the citizens of the U.S., many of whom have little education, many of whom have even less power or influence in their culture, have, rather than cynically throw up their hands or say “I told you so,” decided to change the facts, to refuse to accept that corruption is a part of doing business, and have acted to change their immediate realities. Their attempt to get Andrés Manuel López Obrador in office will likely fail but their chances of making a difference are practically guaranteed. Mexican politics, we can be sure, will not be the same after these events.
As the new Editor-in-Chief, it is my hope that The GC Advocate, as its name implies, will be more than merely an affirmation of this fashionable cynicism and more than merely a litany of the dead and dying. It is my hope that The GC Advocate will not only be a source for information, but a vehicle for action and change. Toward this end The GC Advocate will continue to offer intelligent critiques of world events, but we will also be dedicating a larger portion of our reporting to those local events that affect our readers directly and which they can have the most influence over. The GC Advocate is dedicated, for instance, to offering our readers the information they need to hold the CUNY and GC Administrations and the city and local governments accountable to the needs and concerns of those that they serve, while also offering an increasingly global perspective on justice, higher education, politics, art, and democracy.
