Noise And Dust
A feature of our time is media punditry. From MSNBC, to Fox, to Newsmax and unnumbered internet channels of influencers and opinion makers, to name just a few: Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, and Selena Gomez… The overarching horizon of communication companies is profit/loss capitalism. Competition is the rule and thus the appetite for content is voracious. Hour by hour, 24×7 emotive rhetoric analyzing the latest “news” fashions an echo chamber. Ads are sold based upon the number of followers, not to mention products which are endorsed, hawked directly.
And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut famously said. The racket and babel of our times…
O ye poor fellows
in the great centers of the world’s politics,
ye young and talented men, who,
urged on by ambition, think it your duty
to propound your opinion of every event of the day,
—for something is always happening,
—who, by thus making a noise
and raising a cloud of dust,
mistake yourselves for the rolling chariot of history;
who, because ye always listen,
always suit the moment
when ye can put in your word or two,
thereby lose all real productiveness.
Whatever may be
your desire to accomplish great deeds,
the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you!
The event of the day
sweeps you along like straws
before the wind
whilst ye lie under the illusion
that ye are chasing the event,—poor fellows!
If a man wishes
to act the hero on the stage
he must not think of forming part of the chorus;
he should not even know how the chorus is made up.
The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 177
