Rachel Maddow heals the wound of the split screen truth of false equivalency. When truth is presented as split, leaving it up for you to decide, you can’t because Truth is ONE not two, and the split screen presentation of truth as Two makes it impossible to choose the One because both have equal logic and validity. When the chicken has two heads, which is the real chicken?
This has been the dilemma of media, the two horns of the dilemma. Should media show both sides of an issue or division? Should. you but the truth next to crazy or illusion as if equal? We have split reality with our split screen and now we have two realities, each with their own argument, but using the same facts. We have split facts, and this creates a neurosis in the viewer, who can’t choose the truth as they are both the same, yet opposite, and we must choose the truth…but we can’t. This creates a Zen Koan puzzle. What happens is that instead of seeing the truth that holds both sides, we must choose one side of the coin instead of the other. Yet the other side also has some, but not all the truth.
The problem is that one side (the Conservative side) is the truth of values, which is a subjective truth, While the truth of the Liberal side is objective truth. The Right wants to know what gives me value as a person, the Left want to know how to get something done. The Right worries about the individual and its values, the left worries about conditions and how to fix them. One reality is subjective, the other reality is objective.
This is the divsion between religion and science. Religion’s concern is personal values; science’s concern in how to control objects and make better air conditioner. In our national field today, these two teams, religion/values and science and control are fighting each other on the same objective playing field. This is madness. This is why the Constitution forbids church and state for playing together on the same secular playing field. But religion has slipped in through the back door in the 70s when Evangelicals were invited in to give moral values to politics, which drove Evangelicals to the polls with as passion for saving souls.
RM presents Truth that is objective subjectively. She is in her authentic spot, so you feel she is speaking the truth, even though her view is critical of the opposite view of reality that Fox says is the Right Truth. RM gives truth flesh and blood, her flesh and blood but she delivers the meal with humor and humility, not as the missionary expert, or the detached reporter.
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