Digital devices are great, but sometimes you have to turn them off. 

The partisan drama over a text thread among government and other parties on the Signal app, which is now the source of distracting congressional hearings and finger-pointing, may or may not ultimately be meaningful. I don’t believe it is, and may be completely misunderstood. 

Move on. There are more important things to focus on.

One important thing to look into, however, is how we all communicate to each other. That involves our private lives, and our public ones, and how communicating in them may shape our mental functioning and our definitions of reality. Politicians all come from our shared, common lives, and we all share common behaviors and mental models.

The use of cell phones, laptops, smartphones, text messaging and emails, is hardly a monopoly of any political party, any company or government, or any of us at home.  We are all guilty of slipping into a digital world which has created some challenges in how we manage ourselves, our thoughts, our images, and our privacy.

When I was studying with economist and former White House National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, at the LBJ School in Austin, Texas, back in the early 1980s, he often told me how he very carefully protected even the most seemingly mundane communication between himself and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the senior staff.  He labored for hours, or days, over one word, or a paragraph, before it was shared, if at all.  Ideas were printed, edited, re-written, reviewed, signed in ink, and filed.  

Often the delivery of a single message was done in person, even if it meant getting on a plane and flying half way around the world.

Back when Rostow was working for LBJ, there was, of course, no Internet. Talking in person, and typewriters, paper and ink were still the means of sharing ideas, proposals, and orders.  The land-line telephone was the other.  But there was no voicemail or caller ID. The phone, while distant, was live and audible, and intentions present. You had a real, live conversation, filled with human signals and meaning, rather than remote digital responses, filled with ambiguity. Secretaries also took messages and wrote them down and delivered them: sometimes he or she could add some additional insight based on the tone of voice in the call, or from personal experience with the caller.

Now the ease of using your thumbs to instantly write a cryptic sentence fragment, and hit “send” has created a psychology of gratification, and a false sense of action and understanding.  In many ways, our entire social and political world, our government, and even military, has been digitized, or will be, if we let it.

In earlier warfare, pilots had to physically fly aircraft, and drop bombs with a toggle switch.  Today, pilotless drones are operated by remote computer, with joysticks, and missiles are “fired” with a mouse click.  

Warfare now includes lawfare, which is also fought at a distance, where the drone and its missiles are replaced by the court and its digitized and emailed “rulings.” To progressive intellectuals, digitized words are bullets, and digital devices, the gun.

This is one of the things I admire about President Trump: he communicates directly, often person-to-person.  He gets on a plane and meets people.  He shakes hands.  He looks people in the eye.  He comes from construction, real estate, and physical reality.  He supports making real things, drilling for oil and gas and mining coal; building new fighter jets, ships, and spacecraft; getting automobile makers to build new manufacturing plants here.  If there’s otherwise a battle to fight, he fights out in the open. If there’s a war, he fights to win.

He physically sits at a real desk in the actual Oval Office, and talks every week directly to the American people; he looks them in the eye without a teleprompter. He shoots straight and tells it like it is.  He is in control of his communication, and lives in the real world of physical American business.

America’s Revolutionary War and Civil War orders, our political conventions, declarations, charters, and Constitution, were conducted face-to-face, and arranged, recorded and memorialized, with quill pen and parchment, by candlelight and oil lamp, and delivered in a leather pouch by horseback on a dirt trail.  We built a nation by hand.

Making America great again is also a physical act, done by hand and hard work.

And like the Founders, Trump signs in open public, with a real pen, on real paper, with his own hand, making his physical signature. That’s a contract.

Matthew G. Andersson is a former CEO, a jet command pilot and graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  He has testified before the U.S. Senate and been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License