Making the Underclass Rowdy

While I'm enduring the fourth straight day of rain, fog, and other symptoms of  a world that needs to change its underwear, I'm occupying my time with electronical media.

It's mostly the internet where a little luck on the broker's site will help recoup the cost of those two recent loopholes.  So far this morning, the realized Federal Reserve Cartoons compensate for just under 1 per cent of the Colt/Garand outlay, meaning about 120 straight days of such wild speculation will bring me back to even, FRC-wise, assuming Chairman Bernanke doesn't add  more afterburners over at the Bureauof Printing and Engraving.

But with the other eye I'm occasionally glancing at C-Span where Brooks Brothers   boxers are getting all knotted about the internet "radicalizing" (exclamation points and OMGs) people.

I am sure it does to one degree or another, just like every other mass-communication  enhancer  in history, going back to the papyrus megaphone.  One of the better examples is our own penny press, born in the middle 19th Century (and haven't things gone to Hell since then?).

The internet mimics every other endeavor which makes it easier and easier to prate to  more and more people. In other words, like television and public schools, it arms stupid people with information.*

Even Wiki agrees. The penny papers cost about one-fifth the price of the  established rags and, to boot, offered a powerful selling point:

Simple vocabulary and diction allowed for lower-class and less educated readers to easily understand.

Now, if this way of thinking appeals to the C-Span hand wringers this morning, the logical debate must consider which to outlaw first, the National Enguirer or the Travis McGee Reader and its ilk. Those lower classes are downright dangerous when they learn about stuff happening over in the next block.

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*Or words and pictures that seem like information. That's important, but it's a subject for another essay.