Bernard Shaw dosed me with my first ever red pill - and in doing so, he gave me my first glimpse of the Cathedral in action.
He didn't mean to, and those terms didn't even exist at the time (although the concepts they denote did) - but that's exactly what happened.
In one of the debates for the '88 presidential election (Bush vs. Dukakis), Shaw came charging right of the gate and asked Dukakis the
now-(in)famous "rape" question. To his credit, Dukakis did initially give a direct answer to the question, but it was only a brief and perfunctory answer, after which he proceeded to give a much longer canned spiel about "fight[ing] a real war, not a phony war, against drugs". I remember watching this live as it happened and thinking, "
What the hell? Why is he jabbering about the War on Drugs? That doesn't have anything to do with the question he was asked! He's just using the opportunity afforded by a question broadly associated with 'crime' as an excuse for going off on an irrelevant tangent in order to take potshots at Bush on a subject otherwise entirely unrelated to the question."
Now, I was young when this happened, and this was the first presidential debate I had ever watched. I was still a political naif, and my conception of politics at the time bore a greater resemblance to what you might find in a grade-school civics-class textbook than to what you actually find in the real world. So I was quite shocked and scandalized at how brazenly Dukakis had simply changed the subject in order to spout an obviously prefabricated monologue about something that had absolutely nothing to do with what he had been asked (apart from the general angle of "crime", which was nothing more than the "hook" for his monologue),
But that wasn't the red pill. That was just the setup. The red pill came the following day.
As a 24-hour news channel, CNN was still a pretty novel thing. Despite my naïveté (or perhaps because of it), I was a budding political junkie. Around this time, I would often watch various political programs on CNN, such as "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang". One of those shows was "Inside Politics", a weekday afternoon program anchored by Bernard Shaw. The day after the debate, I eagerly awaited the post-debate edition of "Inside Politics", where I expected to get an analysis of Dukakis' monkey-wrenching of Shaw's question. As I remember it, just before a commercial break, Shaw himself announced that "the question" would be the subject when the program returned. I was probably sitting on the edge of my seat as they came back, when, to my complete amazement, they proceeded to go on and on about Dukakis' lack of emotion in reaction to "the question". Not a peep was ever made about the fact that almost all of what Dukakis had said was utterly non-responsive to "the question". Shaw
et al. only seemed to care about the fact that Dukakis had not shown them the "feels" they had wanted to see from him.
What the hell was going on?! These people were supposed to be journalists!
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. In my confusion and bafflement, I didn't realize it at the time - I just didn't yet have the sufficiency of context that comes with experience - but this was my first bright glimmer of the fact that the Cathedral's objective is to manipulate, not to inform or communicate.
Anyway, thank you very much, Mr. Shaw. You did me the great service of pulling away the first long strip of my clueless innocence when it came to politics and "journalism" (especially "political journalism"). I will always be grateful to you for that (though I am sure that was not your intent). Rest in peace.
