Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory

I've never seen Rashomon, but it's become such a shorthand, a touchstone for a particular type of trope in storytelling that I think I understand the gist of it: Japanese people are liars.

Also, the same set of facts can be interpreted a lot of different ways depending on the perspective of the observer. Sometimes that perspective is fairly arrived at, other times you work for a Rupert Murdoch media outlet, whatever. We're all cursed with the limitation of just having the (if we're lucky) two eyes and two ears, all of which are stuck in our individual, solitary, stupid faces around the fleshy fringes of our skull-encased, stupid brains. Add on to that the cruel cosmically lit-fuse of linear time and we're cursed with having to be selective about what we let in. So before we've even had a chance to be biased or make up Fake News or wait for our orders of interpretation from the Jews living in that Swiss vault who also own all the media, we're already talking about presenting conclusions from an incomplete data set.

Is selective the same as subjective? Probably, yes. What to take in and what to exclude is going to have to be an active choice, unless you're living like Brie Larson in Room, that movie where she lived in that room. But even in that case, the information was pre-filtered for her by the gross rapist who had trapped her in that one room in the first place, so it was still a subjectivity, just his imposed on her own.

And I guess that sums up the idea of the press and press freedom: the ability to choose what information to process. It's the same question non-press people have, but the press then goes and presents their findings as news or opinion to viewers/readers who then have to make yet another choice about whether or not to consume that information. At this point I feel like I'm saying we all end up seeing the world through a pin-hole, like trying to look at an eclipse safely, but I hope the point is that if you go far enough up the curation ladder, there is a vein of raw information to draw from that some responsible person will have access to. But only so long as access to that raw information is unfettered. Not tainted by, say, a president. Or a secretary of state who is also in charge of overseeing the processes and results of the election in which he happens also to be running in for governor.

I don't really want to get into the implications of the actual election results at the moment because there's no way to do so this close to it without it being pure speculative spin. And the aftermath has been so insane, it's also not really possible to talk about it without doing nothing more really than declaring party allegiance. The fact that the raging debate two days following a power-shift election centers on the difference in millimeters of the position of Jim Acosta's left hand is... well, it's 2018, isn't it?

What I'm interested in is voter turnout. There's obviously just one definitive set of numbers measuring voter turnout, but I'm genuinely not sure what to make of it all. We've been told that over 113,000,000 votes were cast, the largest number by volume for a midterm election ever. We've also been told that the percentage of eligible voters participating in a midterm election is the highest it's been in over 50 years, since 1966 at least. The turnout was strong, robust, historic.

But at the same time, in that same set of numbers, we get a voter turnout rate of... 47%? Seriously, just forty-goddamned-seven percent? Sure it's interesting trivia to know it's the "most ever" to vote in a midterm, but 47%? Suddenly the 113,000,000 looks less like an objective measure of engagement of the electorate and more like a Jeopardy! answer 15 years from know that no one will be able to respond with a poorly phrased pseudo-question to.

And that's more likely where 53% of the eligible voters probably were: watching Jeopardy! Or let's be realistic, probably Wheel of Fortune. Yes there were lines to vote and passions seemed high, but most--and I stress most--who could vote decided they couldn't be arsed, either because they weren't engaged or because elements within their state government actively tried to deny them their right to vote, what have you.

To be fair, there was a Star Trek marathon on BBC America that night. Next Generation and Voyager. I guess I can understand prioritizing that. But honestly if you're watching BBC America, you probably hate this country already anyway.