Here's a big post, as announced earlier today.

Two elephants in the room.

They started out as small baby elephants.

One was cute.

The other was hidden.

The cute one grew up and isn't cute anymore.

And the hidden one stayed hidden for a long time, but now it's not hidden. Even so people refuse to see it.

***The cute one

The cute one is Twitter.

It's name is diminutive. It's just a twitter. The sound a little bird makes. A cute little bird. A blue one. In the beginning people made fun of it because people used it to broadcast what they were having for lunch.

Even today when someone says something on Twitter it's called a tweet.

I try to imagine my hippie uncle, who died in 2003, coming back for an afternoon, to learn who the Republican nominee for President is.

Donald Trump, I'd say.

He'd look at me in disbelief.

How did that happen, he'd ask.

He tweeted well.

I think he just fell off his chair.

But that is how he did it.

He routed around the gatekeepers.

Who?

The press and the established leadership of the Republican Party.

My uncle would have had no trouble understanding the Citizens United ruling that allowed unlimited money to determine the outcome of the election.

***How is this like 1968?

In 1968 a new medium was just taking hold.

It had started a few decades earlier.

But the generation that was coming of age in 1968 had grown up with TV.

To us, learning about the world via TV wasn't new. It was the way it was done. Much the way learning about the world is done today via "social media."

Each medium imposes its own blueprint on us, because it determines how we communicate. TV enforced the power of gatekeepers because the infrastructure required to put a station on the air was so expensive and required a lot of different skills. You had to send reporters all over the world. Satellite links were just getting started. It seemed a miracle then that you could watch someone who was reporting from Europe or Asia in real time. The signal bounced off a satellite.

TV centralized. But Twitter does the opposite. Any fool with an iPhone can tweet. And if they're good at it, as Trump is, if they're good at grunts and snorts, putdowns and soundbites, and if what they say resonates with enough people the message gets through. No one has to believe.

And of course just as TV didn't eliminate radio or printed news, Twitter doesn't eliminate TV or radio (it's now called podcasting) or news sites (what newspapers look like now). They all still exist, and feed off each other. But Twitter is the way the sources go direct, and route around the gatekeepers of the 20th century media.

Okay so that's the first elephant, what's the second?

***The war

2016 is like 1968 also because the US is fighting an unwinnable war, in Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, this war is hidden. There are no reporters in the jungle showing us atrocities on the nightly news. No body bags on the news either. However, the whole war is an atrocity, and just because we don't see the body bags, that doesn't mean they aren't there. They are. The government got savvy between the wars, and realized that if they don't show us the bodies, visually, we won't see them. They were right.