OCTOBER 16, 2019 – Anyone who was awake for The Great Recession is familiar with the Michael Lewis book entitled, The Big Short. The movie version followed. “Short,” of course, referred to selling borrowed mortgage-backed securities on the bet that the securities would drop in value. We all know how the bet played out.
More than a decade later, “the big short” describes our attention spans. It also reflects what we are doing to our country.
People, this is not good.
A healthy democracy requires work—headwork. Specifically, it requires reading, listening, thinking, and ultimately, voting. Working that backwards, responsible voting requires responsible thinking, and responsible thinking requires responsible listening, reading.
We should be jolted by polls suggesting that roughly half of the American electorate are not up to the task; that nearly half the respondents think the Ukraine scandal involving Trump and his “personal lawyer” is “too complicated to follow”; that people can’t or won’t follow the House impeachment inquiry; that it’s “too much already.”
This doesn’t bode well for the democracy.
If the Mueller investigation was too complicated to follow if you had a day job, the basic facts of the Ukraine scandal are simple enough to grasp by a 10-minute read of the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with President Zelensky and a 15-minute summation of who’s who and what’s what (and what’s not) among:
Rudy Giuliani – Trump’s personal lawyer without portfolio.
Joe Biden – Former vice president; now candidate for president, who joined chorus of Western leaders condemning corruption in Ukraine.
Serhiy Lushchenko – Prominent Ukrainian investigative journalist focusing on corruption.
Viktor Shorkin – Former Ukrainian prosecutor fingered as corrupt by Western governments.
Yuriy Lutsenko – Another former Ukrainian prosecutor identified as corrupt by Western governments.
Marie Yovanovitch – American ambassador to Ukraine, whom anti-corruption reformers in Ukraine viewed as their champion.
The trouble is, as many as half of our voting citizenry can’t read and concentrate for 25 minutes.
Worse, we live in an Orwellian age, wherein unfavorable facts are made “fake” by mere proclamation, truth is deemed a falsehood when truth threatens power, and lies become gospel by sheer repetition.
Blame the Age of Instant Digital Gratification for our short attention spans. Then blame FoxNews and its master, Donald Trump, for the Orwellian.
If a significant majority of voters cannot be rescued from what has become an Orwellian dystopia; if they cannot find the will and the way to focus—to read, listen, and think responsibly—we cannot expect them to vote responsibility. If we cannot expect them to vote responsibly, we can except Trump to survive impeachment and remain in office after January 2020.
And . . . we can expect corruption and self-dealing in unbridled form; impulsive, damaging decision-making in the most serious matters of trade and foreign affairs; a collapse of civic, moral, ethical standards; and unleashed, untamable extremism.
The American left (center to center-right in many Western European countries) is not free of ignorant and intolerant impulses, but here and now, the left’s influence is outmaneuvered by the Orwellian right, aided and abetted by . . . the big short.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
