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Catching up with the podcasts this morning, I heard Jefferson scholar Clay Jenkinson dedicate his 904th show to "Civility". Like many of us, he was taken aback and outraged by the Tuscon shootings, angered at the lack of civility this country's media has displayed. He made probably the best points I've heard yet, noting that cable news and talk radio has more of an obligation to retain listeners though the commercial interruptions than it does to impart useful information or maintain a tone of civil discourse.

His show was a continuation of his January 17th column in the Bismarck Tribune, "Ratcheting things down to something like civility."

Since our leaders and our pundits seem incapable of modeling the civility that we need to get America moving forward again, we the people are going to have to insist upon it.

We should refuse to elect candidates who use violent rhetoric in talking about our problems, people like Sharron Angle of Nevada who said we may need to employ "Second Amendment solutions" to clean up our government. We need to silence the hatemongers of television and radio by flipping the switch or, if necessary, boycotting the products they help to sell.


That's going to be difficult. As Orson Welles demonstrated, people act irrationally when frightened. They sit through commercials hoping to find that one bit of information that will save their family from the imminent extinction promised by the last teaser on the news. This is something I noted almost three years ago, and it has, if anything, gotten worse.

Why?

I'll go out on a limb and suggest one possibility: Very simply, our media has become more of a commercial undertaking and less a service to the society that hosts it. As more and more cash concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, those few hands have every motive to protect their increasingly powerful positions. Having their commercial media reinforce positions that enhance their continued power is a very simple and very real way of doing this.

Back to the Jefferson Hour, check out the show notes for show #848, Inequality of Income. Jenkinson posts a letter Jefferson wrote to James Madison while he was posted as Ambassador to France. He relates walking with a poor French laborer and engaging her in conversation. He notes how very poor she was relative to the uncultivated land around her, land untouched so that the gentry owners might use it to cultivate game instead of crops. It leads our third president to this conclusion: "Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

I would paraphrase the same, noting that whenever the facts on every given matter are available for examination but are avoided by the media for potential gain, or whenever the rhetoric on any given topic is ratcheted beyond what a normal person would warrant necessary simply to keep listeners riveted to the show broadcasting such rhetoric, "it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

What to do? Let's start by following the sentence Mr. Jefferson wrote immediately previous to the one quoted above:

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise.


By redistributing income away from its present grandiose concentrations, we return to civility. By re-enforcing the media ownership restrictions in place in FDR's day -- and by including under law cable news outlets in that media category -- we reintroduce civility. And by recognizing the wisdom in this bit of Mr. Jefferson's 1800 Acceptance speech, that “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle," we reintroduce civility.

Though I realize that redistribution of income is a hot-button topic to many, I have evidence to back up the assertions of that last paragraph, evidence that shows how more equal societies actually are, among other positives, more civil to each other . . . evidence I'll share on a later post.

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