Bob Neal
The minute-to-minute news feed, often jammed with messages from above, can spin the head of even the most devoted news junkie. Many of those messages miss the mark. Some badly.
Alan Watkins, a Brit writing in 1984 in the Spectator, gave us the term “the chattering classes.” Merriam-Webster defines his term as, “people who talk and write a lot about current political and social matters (often) regarded . . . as an elite class.”
They do seem to chatter on. Lately, a lot of their messages appear to condescend to those whom the speakers may believe need most to heed the message.
Hillary Clinton may have delivered the mother of all condescending remarks during the 2016 presidential campaign when she told an audience in Kentucky, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
There went the votes of West Virginia and Kentucky, parts of Virginia and Ohio and maybe all of North Dakota. Her sentence virtually defines the term tone deaf. And needlessly. Clean energy and clean consciences are putting coal out of business without her help.
A good illustration of this tone-deaf syndrome is Central Maine Power’s New England Clean Energy Connect corridor and its opponents.
Corridor backers run ads with black-and-white photos of small-print pages, a firm voice warning us about lawyers writing referendum questions. Whom else would you hire to write a referendum question? In another ad, a business owner tells us the corridor will help his business and employees. He doesn’t say whether those are permanent employees or temporaries hired to build the corridor.
The commercials deflect attention to the issue of “retroactively” stopping the corridor. (Disclosure. While I was on the New Sharon Select Board, we were the first town to decline to support the project. Tom Saviello, a leader of the opposition, is also a friend, though he had no input into or knowledge of this column.)
Opponents run ads with people from around the state saying why they oppose the corridor, usually citing environmental effects they fear. The most telling is a couple deciding to go look at the early work on the corridor. Seeing the project for themselves sealed the deal for them. The pictures couldn’t possibly help CMP’s case.
Conditioned by 30 years of farming, I don’t stay up late, so I don’t see late-night talk shows. Fortunately, The New York Times runs videos of the late-talkers (Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah, etc.) so I can look at them the next morning.
My favorite is Colbert, but he’s prone to dissing people who can’t afford New York City rents. Speaking of the town that has become the second capital of country music, he said, “One place the delta variant has been running rampant is Branson, Missouri, tourist Mecca for people who are afraid of Mecca.” The line got lots of laughs, including mine.
Then, mocking a parent pointing to Branson’s mockup of the Titanic, Colbert added, “Oh, look, kids, a whole bunch of people died from an easily preventable tragedy.”
He didn’t say tourists in Branson are stupid. But that’s probably what many people heard, especially those who have visited Branson for the music shows.
Back here in Maine, Gov. Janet Mills last week spoke loud, clear and from her heart when she implored people to get a COVID-19 vaccination. The presentation fell flat. Not because she was preaching to the choir but because she wasn’t preaching to the unconverted.
Mills said, “If you’re . . . a school district that’s not requiring universal masking, you’re endangering the children, the staff, the teachers and everyone who enters that school.
“Please just get vaccinated. And whether you’re vaccinated or not, wear a mask.
“I just want to beg people to take it more seriously. Take the masking protocols more seriously, the responsibility of getting vaccinated much more seriously. And listen to what people like Pope Francis said: ‘Vaccination is a gesture of love.’ Think about it that way.”
People who have refused or merely dithered about getting vaccinated are taking it very seriously. I believe their doubts are misdirected, and I am sure they are being preyed upon, even conned, by anti-vaccine zealots and by those who believe the pandemic is good because it damages President Biden. But I don’t doubt for a minute that they take it seriously.
People might more likely listen to their parish priest than to Pope Francis. Dr. Anthony Fauci is well aware of that. He has consistently urged doubters to ask their family physicians, friends, neighbors. Just as important, he has urged them to ignore the anti-social media and the disinformation peddlers. (Did he possibly mean Fox “News?”)
Wanna bet whether the governor persuaded anyone by talking down to us?
Bob Neal wishes he knew more about Alan Watkins, who also gave us the term “young fogey” to describe people who go conservative before their time. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.
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