"Noise and Rampant Fractionalization"
“Dialogue has waxed and waned ever since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who would tell you this chowder head Socrates was no Anaxagoras. And whenever my ears purse at the sound of my own bemoaning, I make it a policy to recall that the halcyon days of yore included the Harding administration. It’s just that the two powers currently ascendant are noise and rampant fractionalization. Agents’ provocateurs aimming to tweak the squares (most of whom are otherwise occupied with paying their rent and fixing your furnace) or marchers on the square still draw cameras and microphones, but a sense of diminishing returns prevails. Give your local mechanic a headline and he can tell you how to spin it, left or right. Your hairdresser is a pundit. The plumber arrives with talking points. The yield curve or babble is approaching the perpendicular. Among the piquant conundrums due to face the nation is: How do you whip the folks into meaningful action when everyone is cocooning in like-minded corners of the Web, rather than synthesizing some sort of national unity through the late-lamented mainstream media, which no matter how you tilt the screen, has had it? The corpse will be wrapped in unsold newsprint, and the viewing will take place online in downloadable form. As a guy who types for a living, I intend to diversify, perhaps into goats, perhaps survivalist chinchillas, but certainly into chickens. I am told there is no longer money to be made in llamas. Additionally, I am pricing solar panels, sawing off my shotgun, and trolling the Y2K sites of yesterday."
Michael Perry
Truck: A Love Story
