Political forums: ABCNews.com’s ‘Both Sides All Sides’

I don’t mean to sidetrack things, but truthfully that ABC thing is brilliant. It’s about time someone makes an effort to hear both sides.

Well, if you look at what’s there it is exactly that. Face it, most people want to hear their point of view, or the polar opposite. People in the middle want to hear both, I think, and this site seems to satisfy all ends.

When discussing politics, unfortunately, there’s two sides. Right, Left, and everyone in the middle. The middle doesn’t get a side or a voice.

And it truly sucks.

Yay! Another way to marginalize people… How about a black people vs white people column? (sarcasm)

What about libertarians, greens, and independents who are right on some things and left on others?

A SOCIAL MAP

As an individual in contemporary capitalist society I see the world through what I call my Baha’i imaginary. This is a coherent, specifiable, politically non-partisan, cognitive and social map of the world. It is what might be called an ideal type, one of the many ‘ideal types’, a term that finds its origins in the writings of Max Weber. It is but one of a range, part of the available repertoire, of maps of my environment, of social and political constructs for developing a consciousness containing deeply held attitudes and beliefs. This consciousness is also the basis of a vision and, in my own case, a far from arbitrary vision, an intellectual position, that I have incorporated and which has evolved into a way of life, a view of reality through my experience and life history. My poetry tells the story of this incorporation, this evolution, this life history. I live this imaginary, draw on this map, as Douglas Kellner uses the word.1 It is the core of my common sense, as the way I see things and define them as they are, as the way the world is, as the way things should be.
-Ron Price with thanks to 1Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford UP, Stanford, 1989,pp.186-187. the term ‘imaginary’ draws on literature concerning political socialization and political cognitive mapping in Austin Ranney, Channels of Power, Harper and Row, 1983.

I’ve developed this map for decades,
but then there are all these other maps,
the media cyberblitz, the hyperreality,1
which hit me in these last stages of history,2
say, for arguement’s sake, since 1953 and
the beginning of the Kingdom of God on Earth.
And I wonder what is real, any more,
as the polarities of life implode, absorb
each other, in a fascinating, instantaneous,
integrated and immensely complex whole
with the structure of language itself
producing reality,
with structure at the centre
not the individual: 3

And what is this structure?
A sliding, fragmentary, open, evasive underpinning,
but increasingly, for us, formalized, beautified,
a crystal concentrate of magnificence, marvelled at.
She is all loveliness. She is the dawning-place of His signs.4

She will yield, wield, exquisite power:
this matrix of fascination
where we fall prey to her charms,
her seduction in a world
of a staggering ubiquity of things
with media-tape-hype going on fast-forward.

1 These are terms Jean Baudrillard uses to describe the media.
2 1953-1963: stage nine; and 1963 to now: stage ten, of history.
3 Core of post-structuralist thinking and theorizing. This idea is also, it seems to me, central to my Baha’i imaginary position.
4 Baha’u’llah, Tablet of Carmel.

Ron Price
24 March 2000

Wow, thanks for the excellent information!