I wondered where to post this. It could go in so many threads. This isn't just about Bill O'Reilly though he takes the brunt of it. It connects so well to the "conservative backlash", those folks who have deluded themselves or have been deluded by the O'Reillys of the world into thinking that change is bad.
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http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/05/final-word-on-bill-oreilly.html
The Final Word on Bill O'Reilly
Everything You Need to Know About the Biggest Empty Suit in America, Including Why He's a Bigger Threat to the Nation Than Clandestine Terrorism
AN ADVOCATE EDITORIAL
The greatest threats to any militarily-secure superpower are neither chemical, nor biological, nor nuclear; instead, such powers--and for the guidance of history in this, treat the Roman Empire as Figure 1--invariably decline because of their own self-inflicted ignorance, coupled, typically, with an extravagant sort of self-indulgence engendered by unearned gravitas.
In the checkered and sordid history of self-inflicted ignorance and unearned gravitas, Bill O'Reilly, of Fox News Channel infamy, is Figure 2.
Had the United States been arrested in its spiritual, moral, technological, geopolitical, ethical, and scientific development around, say, the end of the Eisenhower Administration, Bill O'Reilly would have been as at home on this planet today as a jar of marmalade would have been on the window-sill of a British hamlet in 1923. Instead, O'Reilly is that most curious brand of anachronism, a curio of the past which remains not only unaffected by the last fifty years of human civilization, but--paradoxically--brazenly defiant of it at the same time. It is the ultra-rare sociopath who receives the Word--speaking, here, of the Word which is All Human Progress Since 1959--and fails to be converted.
Take away every recognizable advancement in the field of psychology, every case study and common law decision in the field of criminal justice, every felicitous discovery in the field of medicine, every twice-a-year Enlightenment in the fields of ethics, civics, diplomacy, globalization, and the several hundred sub-categories of the social sciences and humanities now acknowledged, and you are left with an hour-long waft of fetid air (horrifically re-enacted, twice a day) somewhat innocuously dubbed "The O'Reilly Factor."
No single landmark in the history of media, from the Gutenberg Bible to Barbara Walters, has done more to promote arrogant wrongheadedness and willful, self-indulgent stupidity than "The Factor," as it is commonly referred to by its ubiquitous, wrongheaded, self-indulgent, and almost preternaturally stupid host.
To the extent this great nation and the precepts which undergird it should, in the years ahead, falter, or stumble, or embarrass themselves, or lose their adherents, or drift into incoherence, or erode into unresolvable contradictions, or betray their nature, or betray, even, their better nature, it will be due to the sort of insipid tomfoolery and apocalyptically poor judgment which allowed an essentially obsolete intelligence calling itself "Bill O'Reilly" to infect--to poison, to metastasize, to slay--the United States' accumulated stock of intellectual and moral heft.
The terrorists can (and have) assailed our soil, our persons, our institutions, our belief in the invincibility of The American Experience and The American Experiment, but they in no way can indoctrinate the denizens of this plot of land with the sort of habitual thoughtlessness and existential decrepitude that Bill O'Reilly, on a per annum basis, effortlessly foments.
It is the ultra-rare cultural cretin who can comfortably claim to have set his homeland back--morally, spiritually, intellectually, politically, psychologically--an identifiable term of years. And it is the ultra-rare (but not wholly obsolete) Fox News personality who gets paid so extraordinarily handsomely to do so.
As Don King is wont to say: "Only in America."
There is not a single topic on which O'Reilly is loathe to bloviate, and yet, incredibly, not a single topic on which the man's opinions could be considered expert, competent, or even marginally well-informed. Instead, the self-described commentator--whose only formal training is in journalism, a pursuit he admits to not pursue on "The Factor"--books as guests for his daily program the parasitic dregs of their respective professions, so-called "experts" so comically daft, so irrefutably incompetent, and so profoundly disinterested in the mainstream advances of their respective fields that they find themselves helpless to resist the intellectual entreaties of a man no more schooled in their chosen professions than a pair of winter mittens.
The guiding principle of the O'Reilly phenomenon--more broadly defined as the slow decline of American hegemony in the late-20th and early 21st centuries--is not excellence, but self-assurance. That, and a reactionary, know-nothing brand of conservatism which was last fashionable when the Beatles were still learning to play their instruments in Germany, during the infancy of the still-to-be-revolutionary 1960s. Indeed, there is no modern conservative (or neo-conservative) policy position O'Reilly can't criticize for being insufficiently draconian, and no such criticism O'Reilly can't parlay into a laughably fraudulent claim of evenhandedness or better still, when he's feeling particularly sociopathic, "progressivism."
A case in point would be O'Reilly curious and seemingly progressive opposition to the death penalty: an opposition which arises not, he says, because innocents have been wrongly executed, or because the practice has no proven deterrent effect, or because it is disproportionately applied against minorities, or because the poor receive inadequate legal representation in many capital cases, or because the brutalization effect of the penalty adheres to the society which metes it out and not upon those against whom it is worked--for none of these reasons, indeed--but rather because it is too lenient.
O'Reilly favors environmental protection but opposes almost the entirety of the corporate regulatory regimes and consumer actions (cf. boycotts) which would make such protection a viable political reality. He self-reports being progressive on the question of homosexuality--only, however, to the point where he would not tolerate the impaling of gays on the city walls of, say, Houston, or Atlanta, or Jackson, or Memphis. That is, in the view of O'Reilly, gays are free to express the full purview of their sexual orientation--whatever social, moral, spiritual, and psychological manifestations that orientation might give voice to--provided they remain closeted in such beliefs and do not "subject others" (his words) to what he implies are generally deemed foul, odious, and generally disgusting habits and philosophies.
Given a recent sexual harrassment lawsuit (settled out-of-court) and several well-publicized instances of lying, distortion, and/or public vituperation, the notion that O'Reilly is any sort of savant when it comes to the imposition of moral and behavioral discipline on American culture would be an occasion for laughter--were it not, as proposed in the heading of this editorial, profoundly more distressing to the moral and cultural fabric of the nation than, say, mustard gas, or suicide bombings, or sporadic small-arms fire. Those dastardly conventional and unconventional forms of warfare are a potential danger to workaday Americans to be sure, but substantially less dangerous--given the entire lifespan of a geopolitical superpower--than a prevailing view, among the populace of that superpower, that all that is needed to be expert and informed in the year 2005 is a microphone and an opinion.
National Public Radio (NPR), which O'Reilly habitually and predictably derides, presents a valuable counterpoint to "The Factor" worldview. On NPR, a precondition to bloviating on any given topic is having some measure of expertise or experience with same beyond A) having seen an investigative report on television about it, or B) having heard an equally unqualified civilian present a harangue on same on the radio, or C) having been told some immutable truth (or, failing that, a mere anecdote) touching on same by an equally ignorant, slack-jawed, entirely untutored parent or relative born (like, for the purposes of this discussion, O'Reilly) into a 1940s and 1950s society profoundly different from today's. Indeed, the past fifty years of human progress have been simply remarkable, a fact wholly lost on Fox's befuddled superstar, who fails to see that almost every way in which the 21st Century differs from the 1950s--if we only have the courage and requisite longer view to admit it--appropriately puts that long-gone decade in the same box The Enlightenment put The Crusades: at times inspiring (or, more typically, merely educational), frequently embarrassing and ill-advised, and, most importantly, over.
O'Reilly's recent claims that the molestation of children was more effectively dealt with in the 1950s are laughable, as are his submissions that a child can be "made" gay through political indoctrination, that the nation's largest newspapers literally (not even figuratively) hate America, and that Democrats favor socialism as a philosophical/political hegemon (one doubts whether O'Reilly even understands the functioning of a hypothetical socialist state, or could name more than three countries governed by such a political philosophy).
During most of his radio and television broadcasts a listener would be hard-pressed to detect even a single factual assertion made by O'Reilly which is supported by psychologists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, or educators operating in the year 2005, instead of the pre-Kennedy Twilight Zone O'Reilly most assuredly wakes up to every morning.
So: this article is not a "word to the wise," as the wise don't follow Bill O'Reilly in any of the myriad fora this insufferable Neanderthal has inserted himself. It is a word, instead, to those wishing to be wise, and wondering, to the tune of millions of consumers a year, whether the received wisdom reified by O'Reilly's daily bloviating is precisely the right prescription for what ails them.
In a word, it is not.
But we've some thoughts on the matter, following a lifetime of research into the subject.
Finish high school.
Go to college.
If you can't afford the latter, as so many Americans cannot, read avidly--not editorials (including such a one as this is)--but the news sections of newspapers.
Delve into the Classics of world literature.
Travel.
Meet people unlike yourself--and yes, that includes homosexuals and atheists.
Devour studies from the foremost researchers in the fields that interest you. Not pundits with a quick buck to make from disingenuously sensationalizing their experiences or supposed expertise (former prosecutor Jeanine Pirro comes quickly to mind as a legal professional who has prostituted her professional integrity for a book deal) but those with a long, well-documented, and consistent history of seeking the truth for the truth's sake.
Don't be afraid to defer, at the start, to those who know more than you. And don't be afraid, either, of finding out--whether from such more-educated people, or on your own--things which scare you.
Don't be surprised, in fact, if along the way you find out numerous things which scare you, largely due to the amazement you will feel--deep and abiding--when you realize you can't learn the intricacies of, say, the criminal justice system, or the mental health system, or the public education system, or our system of local/state/federal government administration, or form relevant opinions on any of these things, by watching Sean Hannity or listening on the radio to Rush Limbaugh (or, for that matter, Al Franken, or Randi Rhodes, or any other talking head whose jack-of-all-trades routine leads, invariably, to being the master [or even the acolyte] of none at all).
Above all, realize that the pursuit of knowledge has as its central tenet and ineluctable theme the advancement of justice for all mankind, not the validation of a conversation you and your rubber ducky had in the bath at age ten, when Eisenhower was still President and it still seemed improbable women would seek to be a co-equal gender, that (post-Kinsey) academia would throw off the yoke of political correctness and publish emerging truths rather than merely regurgitating time-worn dogma, that beating your child with a belt would at some point cease to be considered a core attribute of effective child-rearing, and that "getting it right" would one day be as admirable a goal as "making ends meet."
Yet today, getting things right is a goal unto itself, and America has been profoundly wrong to allow the elevation to power, authority, and fame a man whose only remarkable quality is managing to fit a necktie around his remarkable ego every morning before breakfast.
Terrorists can sap our strength from time to time, but they cannot reverse or abrogate that profoundly American penchant for (small "r") revolution: moral, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, and intellectual. Nor can they cripple the advancements of the race and the additions to human understanding which just such a penchant has always made not just possible, but indeed probable.
Bombs alone can't destroy a well-guarded civilization.
However, ignorance, self-indulgence, and an unfettered belief in the hegemony of the Self can most certainly do so--in about the time it takes you to turn on your television set.
There are those who are masters at the art of baiting
