DISMANTLING PUBLIC DISCOURSE AT NIAGARA TIMES

The Niagara Times blog administrator seems to be going off the loony deep end. Hobbes, whomever that is, whom I’ve had some civil exchanges with by e-mail, seems to revert compulsively back to an agenda of political assassination usually of Tom Christy. He seems to exhibit or to be motivated by a kind of stalker mentality at this point.

Now I get a lot of good information from his/her(?) site and some interesting insights. I respect just about anyone who participates in the public sphere whether as citizen or government official. But unfortunately there is an aura of ill-willed pernicious partisan politics on the Niagara Times site. And moreover when we don’t know who you really are it is not really public, should not be taken equally seriously and should of course be held under suspicion. Attacking from behind his moniker, Hobbes refuses to confront and challenge publicly as him/herself and prevents democratic dialogue from moving forward toward a political ethos worthy of the values and virtues of America.

The best I can deduce from that site is that it is a republican blog promoting a programmatic agenda to further their cause, projects and power structure. Their particular attacks on Christy are undoubtedly focused on controlling the airways in Niagara County. Of course the logic, be it as it may, is veiled in a bureaucratic rationalism that strains to appear as if it has the interests of clear and unadulterated discourse at heart. In truth it is obscurantist at best and tactically proto-fascist at worst. The substantive argument proffered as reason to remove Christy is that government education on LCTV should, apparently, contain no “political” content. Hobbes, in the name of, well what? Purity, justice, bureaucratic cleanliness?, insists that Christy’s exercise of free speech, his practical questioning in effort to unfold the meaning, implications and possibilites of the matter at hand, not to mention his jokes, violate the sanctity of legitimate educational discourse on government. Yet government actions which can be construed as containing or implying no political content actually presupposes a Fascist social context. A Fascist social sphere is purged of political possibility. All political decisions are already made and embodied in the formal institutions of the “government.” Maybe Hobbes would really like to go beyond Republicanism or possibly even neo-conservatism toward the image and ideals of Cheney’s war machine and dictatorial Executive branch and bring about a neo-Fascist regime.

In truth, government actions engender concerns in the public sphere that are exactly of the nature of “the political.” The real intention of Hobbes' sustained attack is to continue to inflame the fears, defensiveness and anger that can be released with the accusation that language is “politically incorrect” in a political culture that is deeply divided and afraid that the real divisions in our society will surface. So the attempt is made to control speech, dialogue and substantive content such that we cannot move politically beyond the bureaucratically sustained divisions of society that are real.

The cat really slips out of the bag however when Hobbes takes faux “offense”, only in the name of what is “legally” correct of course, at Christy’s “foggy memory” joke. This is really reaching for straws. Not to mention just a little slimey pretending to be sensitive to and getting the humor as if he’s really really down with it. Sorry but this pretense just doesn’t fly. There is an underlying hostility in such subterfuge but it fails to cover up the violence perpetrated against democratic freedom and openness in the name of and in the form of formal concern about following the rules.

So let’s censor political content, humor and then next possibly questions themselves. In fact the reports and opinions of our government officials are really not even opinions when torn out of the concrete context of a dialogue that flows from the interests of the people affected by governmental decisions, projects, attitudes and expectations. Without honest, multi-faceted examination of government officials especially by people without a voice, such opinions are mere propaganda. EDUCATING the public about government comes about through discussion. Mere unexamined information is not EDUCATION. Such discussion need not necessarily have government officials present. In fact much of such discussion would benefit more form the absence of the officials. Reportage by the legislators about the legislators is mere declamation unless placed within the living context of real people with real questions flowing from their lived concerns and interests. Christy seems to fill that bill.

No, Hobbes, there is not an absolute identity of government and politics. They are two sides of the same coin of civic life. To pretend they can be other than analytically separated as concepts useful for intellectual study is to fall into a form of thought called positivism. It imagines or pretends to imagine that each word can refer to a distinctly separate thing in the world. It tries to put such artificial separations to practical advantage as Hobbes is doing here by using highly interpretable bureaucratic rules to separate and alienate what in reality always go together especially if one wants to talk about them as they affect the real world.

But the key word here is "educate." And if Hobbes is truly serious about education, then he should allow what belongs together in reality to be together on LCTV. And, by the way, there is nothing more educational than a good laugh.

I suspect that if the Government channel is finally antiseptically purged to Hobbes liking and all Politics exiled to another channel, probably then the Host on the Politics channel won’t be able to talk about Government. You see it can all get a little absurd can’t it? Rather than become more “politically correctly” paranoid if not stupid, let us lighten up and give up this fear of open public knowledge and discourse.

Moreover, why doesn’t Hobbes come out from the shadows and publicly thematize and debate what he finds so deleterious to the public sphere? Why hide and snipe and beg like the King in "A Man for All Seasons" trying to guilt trip his princes into killing Beckett for him? Why not give up these insidious attacks and be openly and publicly political.

Why not come out of the closet, be a man or woman as the case may be, and talk about what you feel is really at stake. Why can’t you take responsibility publicly for your insights and your errors. There’s something quite anti-democratic and unjust about the secrecy. I’m not quite sure what it is. When I put my finger on it, I’ll let you know.