Reagan Sheds a Tear at Rosie’s Resignation

 by Phillip Ellis Jackson  

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How manipulating the truth is backfiring on the Left.

Back in the 70’s while I was trolling the depths of Regenstein Library researching my dissertation, I stumbled across a book.  It had nothing to do with the subject matter of my thesis, but something about it caught my eye. 

As I glanced through its pages I came across a plate of an old photograph from the turn of the 20th century.  It showed a collection of filthy, dull-eyed, shabbily dressed people living in a hovel, just as one might expect of a poor immigrant family.  But there was something else in the picture that jumped out at me.  Amid the squalor and filth was a smattering of “modern” conveniences; pots and pans, a cast iron stove, and other similar things.

I don’t remember the original purpose of the photo.  Perhaps it was to prove that even the so-called poor in America were better off than the middle class in other countries.  What I do remember quite vividly, however, was that the pots, pans and stoves were rather crudely (and obviously) superimposed on the original photograph.  Pictures of these items had been cut out from other photos and glued onto the surface of the original photograph.  The sharp angle cut lines and ragged edges of the pots and pans were plainly visible, and the old cast iron stove seemed to have magically inserted itself in an area where it didn’t exactly fit.  A new photograph was then taken of the hybrid picture, and inserted into the book as one of its plates.

I started laughing at the obvious forgery, but then began to think about the implications of what I was seeing.  Photography was still a relatively new technology in the late 1800s; one reserved for the professional classes, not the unwashed masses.  What we see today as an obvious forgery is due to our own familiarity with something that was mysterious and “cutting-edge” to the people of an earlier time.  Capturing an image on a photographic plate was akin to splitting the atom.  It was something that only a skilled professional could do, whose process and results were beyond the comprehension of the ordinary man.  If the picture showed pots, pans and a cast iron stove inside a dilapidated old shack, then who was to think that images were rigged? 

By the twenties and thirties, thanks to Mr. Eastman and Mr. Kodak, photography became accessible to the American public, and with it some of the mystery disappeared.  It was then that we began to notice things like certain people magically appearing and disappearing in official Politburo photographs.  The notion that photographs could be touched up and even radically altered, depending upon which Soviet leader had it in for which Soviet official, was no longer a shock to the photograph-viewing public. 

Manipulating a moving picture was something entirely different, though.  When Gene Kelly cavorted with a cartoon mouse back in the 40’s, or Fred Astaire danced on the walls and ceiling of a supposedly stationary room, it was an amazing technological feat for that time.  But even then it was hardly believable.  The people saw it for what it was, simple entertainment brought about by a new technology.

No serious efforts were made to alter reality in a moving picture until the advent of the digital age.  Sure, there were instances before that where scenes from a second film might be spliced into scenes from a first, but the ability to manipulate scenes in a single moving picture sequence had to wait until the Sonny and Cher Show in the late 1960s.  For those of you old enough to remember (and foolish enough to admit watching it), at the end of their show a collection of Sonnys and Chers would appear on the same screen at the same time and sing together.  Just having them all in the same frame was pretty cool for the time, but these figures actually walked in front of each other, not just stood side-by-side. 

A few years later Star Wars brought the digital motion picture revolution to another level. That was surpassed by the Terminator movies where people melted through moving objects or shape-shifted with seamless believability.  After this came the Quiznos commercials where a small toddler barely able to sit up straight was somehow able to speak adult words with lips and mouth movements in perfect match. 

Throughout this all, moving picture legerdemain remained the exclusive province of Hollywood.  Unless you had a few gazillion dollars invested in R&D and a lot of equipment stacked in your basement, the average guy wasn’t going to show us Humphrey Bogart interacting with Hubert Humphrey.  That is, until U-Tube let us all see a creative re-interpretation of Apple’s 1984 Big Brother ad, this time featuring Hillary Clinton as everyone’s “Big Mother.”

Sure, this ad was still a little crude by today’s standards.  The important thing about it, though, is that it wasn’t made on the back lot of Paramount, but instead inside a Pentium processor.  Some guy working with common, commercial grade equipment was able to manipulate moving images in a way that shows us all what the next 20 years will bring to an ordinary laptop. 

But we don’t have to wait another day to see what the future holds if it’s just a photograph you want to play with.  Today, there’s virtually nothing that can’t be invented or created and put in a picture format, from John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda, or Israeli bombs producing tremendous amounts of death and destruction where little damage actually occurred. You can photoshop George Bush’s face onto a dog’s neck or have George Clooney’s head emerging from a burro’s behind with the same ease — and believability — that Time Magazine can craft a single tear onto Reagan’s cheek.

The eyes can no longer believe what they see.  A photograph can convey a thousand lies as easily as it speaks a thousand words.  History becomes what we wanted it to be, not a reflection of what actually happened.

I suppose that, like the example I began this essay with, people a hundred years from now might look at today’s digital manipulations and laugh at the obvious forgeries.  A stray pixel here or there, easily detected by their equipment, would be a dead giveaway.  But until that day comes we’re left with the sad fact that we can not automatically believe what we see, even when we see it. 

Taken to an extreme, this uncertainty has produced some remarkable observations. Was Kennedy really killed in Dallas by a lone gunman, or was it all just a ploy?  Did a plane really fly into the World Trade Center as the cameras showed, or was it all a fake to justify an illegal war against Iraq?  Seeing a photograph and/or watching a film or video is not enough to convince the skeptics that JFK isn’t still living somewhere in the White House basement, and George Bush himself didn’t bring down the Twin Towers.

Since our eyes no longer reveal truth at first glance, is it even less of a wonder that the words we speak accomplish far less?  All evidence is manipulated, so no evidence exists other than that which manifests itself through an individual’s “common sense.”  But what is common sense if it has no grounding in facts and reality?  

In The-Word-According-to-Rosie, England and the U.S. conspired to have Iran seize British sailors to start another Middle East War.  The U.S. government attacked itself on 9-11.  The Supreme Court voted against partial birth abortion because the Pope told them to do so.  Bush ordered the levees in New Orleans to be dynamited, and Dick Cheney deliberately shot his friend to silence him from talking about something or other (insert secondary conspiracy notion here).

The list is endless.  Because of this, practicing Christians are thought to be no different than Islamic terrorists in the mind of Rosie, the new spokeswoman for her generation.  Present her with a counter argument and she’ll simply ignore it, and then promptly start to talk about Enron and Global Warming.  Nothing that conflicts with her views can be proven because nothing is provable.

This is the state of political discourse in America today.  I suppose there are a few scattered pockets of individuals here and there who really want to understand the what’s, why’s and wherefore’s of an issue.  But for the most part, I believe that most people on the Left (and a few on the extreme Right) are no longer capable of rational thought. 

Just have a quick glance at my Looney Liberal Chronicles if you have any doubt about the intellectual vacuity of the Left.  Most of the people whose opinions I chronicled weren’t Code Pink kooks.  They were lawyers, academics, and business professionals; supposedly accomplished, intelligent people.  But to a person they all became completely unhinged when discussing the actions of George W. Bush and his fellow evil Republican supporters. At least the Right hated Clinton for his policies (trying to nationalize health care, refusing to fight terrorism, etc.) and personal actions that demeaned the office of the Presidency (think Monica and lying under oath).  Bush is hated by the Left simply for existing.   

So where does this leave us now.  I believe that we stand at a precipice, and despite my rather gloomy introduction, I think the world may have just blinked instead of leaped.  The outcry over the Reagan tear was so loud — even though a reference was made to it as a manipulated photo in the Time Magazine article itself — that I believe other mainstream news outlets will have pause before doing something similar. (All bets are off for the Moveon.org-type fringe media, which has no interest in anything other than political propaganda, and thus manipulating the facts is what they are all about.)

In addition, the insanity of Rosie O’Donnell finally reached a breaking point where even it could no longer be tolerated by the Bush-hating crowd.  Perhaps it was one too many profanity-laced public tirades against Donald Trump, coupled with her Alec Baldwinesque admission (to the applause of her audience) that she too regularly curses at her kids, that was all the network could take.  We may never know what actually prompted her departure from network TV, but we’ll never be at a loss for possible examples to choose from.  Showing her allegiance to the truth first and foremost in all her pronouncements, Rosie informed us that she and ABC/Disney couldn’t come to terms on a new contract, so she (Rosie) decided to leave the show.  ABC/Disney is shedding no tears.

The fact is, if you follow the ebb and flow of American politics, you’ll notice an enduring trend.  There is a built-in self-correcting mechanism in our political process that compensates for abject stupidity once it has finally reached a breaking point.

You might all remember the governmental fiat from the 70’s that the USA was going metric before the turn of the century.  Well, as that day neared, the adults once again took a hard look around and put an end to this public mandate.  Teaching the metric system to our school children is one thing, but it’s entirely different to force the public to think in terms of kilometers and centimeters while driving and buying their clothes.

Today, the public’s patience for lying and manipulation is starting to wear thin.  Rosie may have hit a few sympathetic notes at first with a fair portion of the viewing public, but the more she spoke the more insane she became.  Her insanity was fine until that Don Imus moment arrived and the blue suits in network programming saw a threat to their bottom line.  Rosie had to go, and thus Rosie “decided” to leave.

The environmental movement nuts are next in line.  It’s one thing to save the environment by purchasing carbon credits and animal-friendly license plates.  It’s quite another to insist that we must use only a single square of toilet paper, retaining a small, unsoiled portion of it to clean out our finger nail after a successful wipe.  When that, and other Kyoto-style cutbacks on our standard of living so that China and India can continue polluting, become reality instead of good-sounding rhetoric, the American people will look around and say, “what the hell?”  And then it’s over — or at least on its way back to a more reasonable policy.

As the Democrats push for surrender in Iraq instead of giving the military the tools it needs to accomplish its mission, the same type of self correcting mechanism will come into play.  We’re already seeing evidence of this in the nervousness of certain Liberal columnists who think that Harry Reid went way too far in his “the war is lost” remarks, and that Nancy Pelosi should confine herself to destroying the Bush presidency instead of mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict.  2008 could be another 1994 if the Democrats aren’t more careful (which means, if they aren’t more careful in hiding who and what they really are instead of laying it all out on the table like they’ve been doing recently).  In a real war with real consequences, the American people do not want to cut and run, which is why Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are scratching their heads over why their defeatist rhetoric is not winning them standing ovations from mainstream America.

American public opinion is a lumbering mass.  But once it’s set in motion, an inertia of its own begins to take hold.  As the pendulum reaches its breaking point, we may well see a counter-reaction to the idiocy and insanity of the Left.  It’s already started with Imus and Rosie, who’ve lost their jobs for different reasons.  One can only hope that Pelosi and Reid will be next.

Then Time Magazine should run another cover with Reagan’s tears.  Only this time they would be tears of joy as the country regains its soul.

Culture: Hollywood, Entertainment, Culture: Media

Read more articles by Phillip Ellis Jackson