Professor William Spanos was a professor of literary criticism at Binghamton University in the '90s. He taught subjects like Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism, and was very likely to assign readings from folks like Foucault and Derrida. His mien and bodily demeanor were often compared to "Lear in the storm" by those seeking to describe him, and he was solidly liberal in his political leanings. I took a class with him on Postmodernism, in which I took an incomplete that I satisfied years later with a paper discussing emerging network technologies and the panoptic gaze. He gave me a B+ with the comment "I don't see what this has to do with postmodernism, but it is fascinating nonetheless." His garrulousness won him the awe of his students.

So it came to pass that while I was there, DJ'ing and serving as News director for the campus radio station, that the Fairness Doctrine fell. A right wing talk show would joining our dinner hour lineup, and I was quite distressed. Lo and behold, there was William Spanos crossing the campus like a thunderstorm that was late for Office Hours. I accosted him, explained what was happening, and asked for his assistance in preparing a rebuttal. His response comprised two main points:

1. You can't argue with Crazy and
2. This will pass, reason will prevail. 

Well, it hasn't passed, and these two points have been the reason that Democrats have largely sat by for 40 years while the tools of critical thinking were systematically undermined by the rise of right wing radio and TV, and Republican assaults on Public Education.  The groundwork was laid then, with the siloing of traditional media that the destruction of the fairness doctrine made possible, for the political landscape we have today. It is no accident that Donald John Trump awarded his Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh and not to, say, Mark Zuckerberg. And while we wring our hands about the role of social media in the spread of mis/disinformation, we do not stop to ask what fruit the fields of Facebook and Twitter might have brought forth had the broadcast spreader of public discourse not come to them preloaded with the rants of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly. 

Democrats have stood idly by while everything that ever made America something other than a "shithole country" has been dismantled. The fact that January 22nd 2021 came and went without Donald Trump clapped in irons means that not even a Confederate flag being marched through the Capital is sufficient to prod them to action. They ask me for my money and I ask myself whether that money belongs in their election coffers or my get the hell out of Dodge coffers, and the latter is winning. 

C.S. Lewis notes in Perelandra that

1. You cannot reason with Evil and 
2. If you do not destroy it, it will prevail. 

The 30 years since that conversation with Professor Spanos have proven Lewis right and him wrong. And we are left on the precipice of a fall not unlike that which Germany took in 1938.