I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

Read this entire thing.

All the points Al makes here speak right to the heart of what Decius and I are trying to do with MemeStreams. I do share the belief that the Marketplace of Ideas is in danger, and the Meritocracy of Ideas is mostly dead. I also see the Internet as the thing that is going to save it. We need to increase our intellectual production capacity. Ideas evolve through dialogue, and a dialogue does not exist in a broadcast environment. The meritocracy that we assume to exist, which is key to the whole process, is being strangled to death by the hands of people like my arch-nemisis, Rupert Murdoch.

I badly want to get Al to speak at MTSU about these issues. Last year he gave a talk about the environment, and it was a good talk, but it was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear this.

I think I'm going to bounce around some email and see what I can make happen.

Al Gore tells it like it is