VISION & MISSION STATEMENT

I believe the most remarkable and disturbing fact of our time is the high percentage of Americans who, according to several polls, believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks, and who believe that “weapons of mass destruction” have been found in Iraq!

Next to this, in my opinion, all the other popular public/political issues pale in comparison, and are simply detail. In the face of this degree of ignorance and misinformation, I am unclear how participatory democracy can survive for long.

The mentality which can accept an attack on Iraq as a response to “terrorism,” combined with the US' power and influence in the world, is a dangerous combination. And a sad fact, considering the US' largely squandered potential for POSITIVE influence in the world.

Encouraging this simplistic, fundamentalist, belligerent, willfully-ignorant, divisive, jingoistic, conspiratorial, us-versus-them , "good-guys-versus-bad-guys"  world view is a cottage industry in this country for certain politicians, pundits, preachers and broadcast “personalities” who, sadly, prey particularly on the many good-hearted, well-intended, genuine Christians and others who have been
co-opted by these phony moralists.

This Morality Play, the external-projection and demonizing they promote, distracts us from the many more serious long-term and short-term issues which consequently never make it to “The News” or the political debate – and which have great potential for destroying our world and our civilization.

My work is to use my particular gifts in media and communication, combined with my small-town upbringing and point of view, to negate that sort of demagoguery, using primarily the Ben Franklin methodology described below.

BEN FRANKLIN HAD IT RIGHT

He was a funny writer, with a . . . taste for pseudonymous pranks; he hid his most ascerbic opinions behind the masks of made-up characters. But he had world-class ambitions, and he understood that these ambitions were probably best served by achievement . . .

...he understood that he would inevitably be viewed as a provincial, and that it paid to play the clown a little . . .The metropolis, while it mistrusts an upstart, forgives a lovable provincial eccentric.

Franklin liked to write letters claiming to be from other people . . . in order to dramatize some political point through obvious overload. The last thing he wrote was a letter purportedly from a Muslim slaver . . . whose lust for slavery was intended to hold a mirror up to the American slaveholder's own, and shame him.

Franklin was an instinctive ironist . . . it was his natural mode . . . the whole thing depended on being reported with an absolutely straight face. It was not that he did not value honesty . . . He would have beem reluctant to to say something that he believed to be a lie. But, as a businessman and a writer and a diplomat, he might very well be willing to dramatize, or even overdramatize, something he believed to be essentially the truth.

Franklin's essentially ironic, distancing turn of mind . . . gave him a kind of second sight into the minds of his hosts. There is little sham in French life, but a lot of show, a lot of rhetorical gesturing. Franklin understood this style instantly. He was pretending to be a naif . . ., which the French knew to be faux, and they were pretending to be worldly, which he knew to be an illusion.

But the logic of power depends largely on the perceptions, the feelings, of the people who have it. Franklin understood that, above all, the good opinion of the French mattered. It paid to be liked and admired, and he made sure that he was. He knew that he could not make his country, and its needs, inescapable if he did not make himself, and his cause, irresistable.

-- Adam Gopnik, "American Electric", The New Yorker June 30, 2003