## Metadata - Author: [[George Saunders]] - Full Title: The Braindead Megaphone - Category: #books ## Highlights - Megaphone Guy is a storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate—they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible. ([Location 192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=192)) - The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=204)) - But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know, via high-tech sources, it’s clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others. It frequently sheds its political skin for a stroll through Entertainment Park, where it leers and smirks and celebrates when someone is brought low by, say, an absence of underwear or a drunken evening. ([Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=216)) - Now, why aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing discourse should prove more profitable than its opposite is a mystery. Maybe it’s a simple matter of drama: ranting, innuendo, wallowing in the squalid, the exasperation of the already-convinced, may, at some crude level, just be more interesting than some intelligent, skeptical human being trying to come to grips with complexity, especially given the way we use our media: as a time-killer in the airport, a sedative or stimulant at the end of a long day. ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=230)) - A culture’s ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=248)) - But this community constitutes a kind of de facto ruling class, because what it says we can’t avoid hearing, and what we hear changes the way we think. It has become a kind of branch of our government: when government wants to mislead, it turns to the media; when media gets hot for a certain story (i.e., senses a ratings hot spot), it influences the government. This has always been true, but more and more this relationship is becoming a closed loop, which leaves the citizen extraneous. Like any ruling class, this one looks down on those it rules. The new twist is that this ruling class rules via our eyes and the ears. It fills the air, and thus our heads, with its priorities and thoughts, and its new stunted diction. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=280)) - But I think we’re in an hour of special danger, if only because our technology has become so loud, slick, and seductive, its powers of self-critique so insufficient and glacial. The era of the jackboot is over: the forces that come for our decency, humor, and freedom will be extolling, in beautiful smooth voices, the virtue of decency, humor, and freedom. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=300)) - What I propose as an antidote is simply: awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same. Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote. ([Location 312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=312)) - This battle, like any great moral battle, will be won, if won, not with some easy corrective tidal wave of Total Righteousness, but with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=314)) - Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible. ([Location 318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=318)) - A sentence, Forbes seemed to believe, not only had to say something, it had to say it uniquely, with verve. A sentence was more than just a fact-conveyor; it also made a certain sound, and could have a thrilling quality of being over-full, saying more than its length should permit it to say. A sequence of such sentences exploding in the brain made the invented world almost unbearably real, each sentence serving as a kind of proof. ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=787)) - Before Johnny Tremain, writers and writing gave me the creeps. In our English book, which had one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives, maybe, or Amalgam 109), the sentences (“Larry, aged ten, a tow-headed heavyset boy with a happy smile for all, meandered down to the ballfield, hoping against hope he would at last be invited to join some good-spirited game instigated by the other lads of summer”) repulsed me the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father’s friends repulsed me. I would never, I swore, wear slippers like that. Only old people who had given up on life could wear slippers like that. Likewise the sentences in Amalgam 109 or Polyglot Viewpoints seemed to have given up on life, or to never have taken life sufficiently personally. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=799)) - Forbes suggested that the sentence was where the battle was fought. With enough attention, a sentence could peel away from its fellows and be, not only from you, but you. I later found the same quality in Hemingway, in Isaac Babel, Gertrude Stein, Henry Green: sentences that had been the subject of so much concentration, they had become things in the world instead of attempts to catalog it. ([Location 808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=808)) - The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions. ([Location 829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=829)) - The difference between Esther Forbes and the authors of Polyglot 141 was that Forbes had fully invested herself in her sentences. She had made them her own, agreed to live or die by them, taken total responsibility for them. How had she done this? I didn’t know. But I do now: she’d revised them. She had abided long enough with each of them to push past the normal into what we might call the excessive-meaningful; had held the prose up to sufficient scrutiny to turn it into something iconic, something that sounded like her and only like her. ([Location 830](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=830)) - Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility (“On structures not unlike rock masses, it was observed that certain animals perhaps prone to flight slept somewhat less aggressively than previously”), or something more diabolical (“The germ-ridden avatars of evil perched on their filthy black rocks in the otherwise pure bay, daring the clear-souled inhabitants of the city to do what was so obviously necessary: kill them before they could infest the city’s hopeful, innocent children”); the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most important of all, tells us what we really think. But this process takes time, and immersion in prior models of beautiful compression. ([Location 846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=846)) - Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation. ([Location 1029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=1029)) - “No one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck’s moral crisis,” Lionel Trilling said, “will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives.” ([Location 2419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000VMBYPC&location=2419))