A Plea for Clarity

We are done with the elections, and I and many of my friends and family are breathing sighs of relief that the campaigning is over. I couldn't believe my ears this morning, then, when I woke to the voice on the radio station saying it was time for the pundits to analyze the voting trends, and for the Republican party to begin courting the Latino vote in earnest. My mind knotted in sudden frustration and anger.  Will we as a nation ever learn?

We have been assaulted by every kind of overt and devious stream of propaganda for at least the past year in preparation for our day of selection. Here is a website of information on how societies propogate the passing of persuasive information among us: Propaganda. (Oh darn. That's not poetical alliteration: that sounds like a tongue-twister.) Scroll down to the "Techniques" section and you will find a long list.  Do you recognize any of these as having been used in your education on your voting choices?  I can verify many from ad hominem on down the list in my exposure to political campaigns and see them used by both major political parties. And believe me, I recognize my own susceptibility. Those who sell us our policies know advertising tactics very, very well.  Their spiels can zip right by our logic.  Joseph Conrad said it well, "He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense."
("A Familiar Preface." The Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)

I long for a change.  I long for our parties to come clean, but I sincerely doubt they can, because they are not clean.  I may be a bit crazy myself, but I am nowhere near the kind of crazy it must take to want to be President in this day and age. Perhaps our candidates actually like allowing their personalities to be completely distorted into something the "American people" want. Is that called masochism in psychological circles?  We vote in a swamp consisting of monetary greed and power hunger. Voting is like trying to wrestle a writhing boa constrictor.

So, if the system can't be run through some kind of water purifier, can we start elsewhere?  I believe that one of the most important tasks a teacher could assume during his or her years of teaching is to show our young people how to recognize at least the basic forms in which propaganda comes.  We learned these in our junior high.  I watched during a parent-visiting day when my son's elementary school  "gifted" class learning to evaluate these techniques. Why can't this be mandated in all classrooms?  It's a fun process--learning to take apart all speeches and advertising to look for the methodology being used to persuade.  This does not force the teacher's opinion on the student, but helps them look for kernals of truth in what's being said. Or, on the other hand, lies obscured as truth. And if it's too much to ask of teachers, can we at least ask any parents that are familiar with the process of indoctrination to pass on their knowledge of the techniques at home, so that their children may teach others to look at things more closely? To question what they hear before adopting it as truth? Perhaps the ability to do so is a more important qualification for voting than a photo i.d..