Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday August 23, 2009

Must the media celebrate ignorance?

By Jim Taylor

Unintelligible rage
        We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to live here. In fact, I had to turn down a very attractive job offer in Atlanta because I could not get adequate medical coverage for him south of the Canadian border.
        Yet the United States is currently holding mass rallies against exactly the kind of medical system that saved us from being driven into poverty, that gave our son a good life, a full and happy life, for another 16 years.
        Protesters wave placards against socialism, against Marxist plots, against destroying the American way of life. The Republican Party rails against the British and Canadian medical models as “evil and Orwellian.”
        Town hall meetings organized to discuss health care feature “mostly older Americans… yelling about ‘death panels’ and state-organized euthanasia for the elderly,” wrote Tabatha Southey in the Globe and Mail.
        Southey continued, “There’s a frightening level of unintelligible rage at these meetings, much of it parsed earnestly on the endless news.”
        There’s my concern – why do the news media celebrate ignorance?

Irrational outbursts
        Katy Abram stood up at one of Senator Arlen Specter’s town hall meetings. She lectured him about the “systematic dismantling of this country… I don’t want this country turning into Russia – turning into a socialized country…”
        Her outburst earned her a television interview with Laurence O’Donnell. She told him, “We have a small business, and the amount of taxes we pay is ridiculous. And yet they want us to pay more…”
        But under O’Donnell’s questioning, it turned out she didn’t know that increased taxes would only apply to families with incomes over $250,000. She also didn’t know what her family income was, or how much taxes her business currently pays.
        They do have health insurance, she agreed. With $5000 annual deductible. Their medical expenses haven’t exceeded their deductible yet. As prolific Internet essayist Bill Noxid put it, sarcastically, they “pay the entire cost of their healthcare every year, plus whatever they pay to the insurance company… and they are afraid someone is going to forcibly take that choice away from them?”
        Katy Abram makes Sarah Palin look like Mensa material.

Lost causes
        Unfortunately, it’s not just American media who provide a platform for the discontented and inarticulate.
        After excellent reporting on the complex issues debated during the recent General Council meetings of The United Church of Canada, even the newspaper I write for couldn’t resist one delegate blasting his church.
        Geoff Wilkins chairs an organization called the National Alliance of Covenanting Congregations. It was formed to oppose the United Church’s decision 20 years ago that gay and lesbian persons could be ordained as ministers. The NACC has about 75 member congregations – about two per cent of the church.
        “For almost 20 years, Geoff Wilkins has been campaigning against what he says is the church’s drift away from orthodox Christian principles,” Ron Seymour reported in a front-page feature.
        And after almost 20 years, Wilkins still thinks his tiny minority can reverse that decision? Gimme a break!
        A fundamental law of all social organizations is that they may alter course; they may even set a new course; but they never-never-never go into reverse.
        Being Canadian, of course, Wilkins is more polite about his opposition than the U.S. town meeting protester shown on national television – to quote Bill Noxid again – “wagging his finger in the face of a senator, calling down the wrath of God on him, while the police stand around and wait for him to run out of breath.”
        I firmly believe that a knowledgeable, articulately argued viewpoint deserves more attention than an ill-informed rant.
        I also believe that the media have a responsibility to distinguish between the two, and not to simply lend credence to the ignorance of extremists.
        But I’m increasingly afraid that both beliefs are a losing cause.

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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



I suppose last week’s column actually had two themes – the relationship of North American churches with Israel, for good or ill, and the forthcoming shortages as clergy retire. The letters I received reflected both themes.

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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