Of all places to find a commentary of what we are doing to ourselves as a culture – Roger Daltrey (of The Who if you are under the age of 50), in a recent interview gave some interesting commentary as he looks down the road and sees a “miserable world.” It should give pause that someone who is not only toward the end of their life but also lived through the unique time (as a voice) in the 1960s, describe where we are headed, “you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.” What I think is relevant are the comments regarding the lack of geniune discourse in our present time, “it’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth…it’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth and start to read books again.”
Imagine that possibility, settling down long enough to enter into the mind of another in the contempletive activity of book length studies. The route to nowhere brings to mind the words of Neil Postman, “the press worked as a metaphor and an epistemology to create a serious and rational public conversation, from which we have now been so dramatically separated” (1985).