Interesting stuff from the Memphis Commercial Appeal today:

Al Gore wants us to start talking

By Chris Peck
October 9, 2005


Whatever happened to Al Gore?

''I used to be the next President of the United States,'' he joked a few days ago.

He's more relaxed. He's lost some hair. He's living in Nashville.

More interesting, he's now in the media business.

On Aug. 1 Gore and some investors launched Current TV. It's a cable and satellite network that focuses on news and invites viewers to share in developing content and even supply video for the 20 million households that now can get the network.

Why start his own TV network?

Well, he needs a job.

But the former vice president speaks to a higher calling. He thinks this country's democracy is in grave danger.

"It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse,'' Gore explained in New York.

In essence, Gore says the core function of the media, namely to inform and engage the public in a discussion of important ideas facing the nation, has broken down.

''It's almost as if America has entered an alternate universe,'' Gore said.

His examples:

Saddam Hussein didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, yet at least one-third of Americans still think he did.

The gap between rich and poor in this nation continues to grow, yet few leaders even talk about it, despite the pictures from Hurricane Katrina.

Even on huge issues like war and peace, precious little debate bubbles up in the public square.

''Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?'' Gore asked.

In essence, Gore makes the case that our nation is afraid of or disinterested in having vivid, focused discussion about the big public policy issues of our time.

Gore believes we have forgotten about the tremendous value of what was once America's fabled "marketplace of ideas.''

Gore argues that rather than trying to reason through difficult issues, Americans now make political decisions based on TV spots, or on listening only to people who think like they do -- or simply by making a snap judgment without much thought.

"It is the destruction of our marketplace of ideas that accounts for the 'strangeness' that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation,'' he said.

And the media are partly to blame.

TV, while clearly the dominant voice in society, is really a one-way broadcast that doesn't allow for much true debate. And entertainment values have now overwhelmed the news.

Newspapers aren't as influential as they once were.

Radio is dominated by entertainers who traffic in one-side politics.

For now, the Internet is too diffuse for people to use as a way to engage in a true public debate.

Gore speaks of a German philosopher, Jergen Habermas, who describes today's barren political discourse as a kind of ''refeudalization of the public sphere.''

''The feudal system, which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever,'' Gore said.

And that's where the former vice president thinks we are headed today -- toward a nation where a great mass of people live in ignorance, a nation where wealth and power rule without the people having enough knowledge to mediate.

Will Al Gore's Current TV change all this?