roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV - PUBLIC

roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Conal L Hession (esquire@creighton.edu)
Fri, 6 Jan 1995 17:29:29 -0500 (CDT) 

Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 17:29:29 -0500 (CDT)
From: Conal L Hession <esquire@creighton.edu>
Subject: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC
To: roundtable@cni.org
In-Reply-To: <9501060952.AA01226@athena.capital.edu>
Message-Id: <Pine.3.89.9501061756.A5110-0100000@bluejay.creighton.edu>


Jeff I find your reply offensive.  I've read most of Vigdor's postings 
and his broad brush treatment of anything he finds offensive is far 
from the brilliant insightful pedestal worthy status you give him.  
Regardless of your opinion of Vigdor, the point is, he picked the fight.

Besides, Brad's implied point is valid.  Just because you intend to 
remove the current power elite and replace it with something more 
palatable does not mean that the structure has changed.  At some point 
there is always a value judgment, an election of what is "public 
opinion" and the way many here have been talking, the currenty "public" 
is too mesmerized by Newt, O.J. and Oprah to know what the hell is 
really going on.

I agree, the media manipulates public opinion, and vice versa, in the 
extreme.  But that being said, you are now diving "for the public good" 
apart and seperate from any reliance on what the public actually wants.  
Once the public is determined to be incapable of taking care of itself, 
the possiblity of abuse and fraud arises, regardless of whether Newt 
Gingrich, Adolf Hitler (or his contemporary fans), Mother Theresa, 
Mohammed, or Vigdor is at the helm.

Besides, the point that Madison, Jefferson, and all the other White, 
Male, Slave owners made in setting up the very structure of this 
powerful and laughable county is that public opinion has always been 
able to be manipulated to "evil" or damaging ends. (6 year Senate terms, 
checks and balances, lifetime judiciary.) The fact is that the political 
parties are a joke, niether is far apart from the other and most of the 
politicians are concerned with lining their pockets, or their parachutes, 
or stroking their egos.  [I have yet to understand why else you would 
want to be a politician in this country that prefers illusions of virtue 
to truth and real people.]

The idea that somehow either the "left" or the "right" (or any fringe or 
centrist position) is any more or less legitimate or true is laughable.  
Both lose claims to legitimacy when they stray from public opinion. 
None have ever stated an exclusive claim on the "truth." (Whatever that 
may be.)

Whew, I've been saving that up for too long! 

Conal Hession
<esquire@creighton.edu>


On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Jeff Briggs wrote:
> 
> Reply to Brad Cox:
> 
>      Sneering at ideas of the public good indicates you do not 
> think well, but simply parrot propagandas reflexively. The part
> of Vigdor's post that you cast into the hinterlands of Siberia
> with craven accolades to a benighted right-wing politician
> and to an American public who vote by horserace news coverage
> and better-funded and more effectively degrading commercials is
> the very part I liked the best. 
> 
>      The test of his idea is in the benefit it might bestow.
> To mock it witlessly with such hatred without dealing with it
> first on its own merits is an expression of an ugly trendiness
> among those so intellectually challenged that they turn their
> brains into copy-cat jack-in-the-boxes and pop out threateningly
> at a series of preprogrammed buzzwords indicating "liberal"
> tendencies - such as "public good" or "helping people".
> 
>      Your post has been an apt reflection of a dangerous
> ideology that owes more to Atila the Hun than to the founding
> fathers, who bandied about concepts of the public good without
> breaking into paroxysms of Cold War epithets.
> 
>      Your signals are crossed. Regroove yourself. Calm 
> down and start your education by reading widely.
> 
> Jeff Briggs
> jbriggs@capital.edu

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