As I recoiled from the outburst, crystal clear it was made to me how viscerally deeply do these broadcasted messages strike.  

It's crystal clear, sitting down to review a teenager's understanding of the particular broadcast stimulus just received, that thinking about it just CANNOT overcome the full gravity of something that embeds into one's nervous system as directly channelled there by in this case, the audio signal, of a crook.

The conventional wisdom of our culture is that it's the parent who must be responsible for and guard against whatever message his or her child takes from the perceptual commons we understand as the broadcast media. That it's the parent's responsibility to prevent the child receiving objectionable messages in the first place or, barring that possibility, the parent supposedly could rationalize with the kid that the broadcast message just received is bad news, it doesn't comport with our values, and so on. As a result, all of the sudden everything's better by talking through the issues and thinking things over. I don't think so!

As liberal/progressive as it may be, I no longer believe that rationality and just thinking about it are enough countervailance to the thousand word-weight of a picture or sound.

One of the things I came to appreciate about NPR so many years ago was just how fulfilling weekend reports of Scott Simon were made by that 'soundscape' which leaked into my 'sound-picture' from the background of his audiotaped narrative.  

Even more powerful is the forground, and NPR's rebroadcast of the Weekly Address snippet in what I'm calling Saturday's Paradox suggests that even thinking too much about it can't overcome the power of visual and audio image to directly emboss a message onto my nervous system.  

The stereotypical lefty-intellectual buffers reality and understands it through analysis that uses the symbolic placeholders for events, words and ideas, that our rational minds can work with. The power of sound and visual image can shortcircuit reality's buffering through thought to directly push emotional buttons that nature evolved in us exactly so that we don't have to think about things.

Hell, the basic design of physiology and neurochemistry evolved before the capacity for thought and it's a design that was all about survivial, about fright, fight and flight to make us safe in face of danger.

The emotional response is the semi-hardwired valuation of what prospects are presented in current circumsntances, independent of 'thinking about it'.

It's that stereotype of lefty-intellectuals that explains why we lose in the marketplace of ideas. The noise-machine counts on the fact that we still think it's a war of words since we like to believe that everyone thinks about things. Meanwhile the machine banks on the fact that they can emote some core constituency to simply react based on sound and visual image, no thinking required. Especially when you can reinforce the response by repetition! Ain't that right, Rush?!

That's Saturday's Paradox, the battlefield is the American mind but the war's fought with sound and pictures, not only the words of a book!

I'm not suggesting that progressives need to start jerking Americans around emotionally but that we should be smarter and use sound and visual imagery effectively to firm that which our intellectual analysis understands to be true.

Really, how could anyone hate Saturdays anyhow?!?! Conditioning each week by the same voice on that Weekly Radio Address perhaps!

No, I don't really hate Saturdays ;-)