Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Da Bomb.
So…I ran into a discussion elsewhere about Frank Rich’s recent little NY Times article on Glenn Beck, Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day. Not much to it, really…having a professional theater critic write about politics is as unconsciously apropos as it gets in da newsz bidness as it stands in America (Well…there’s always that sports reporter who’s always jabbering about leftiness wing issues on MSNBC…), and like everybody else from Rush Limbaugh to Mother Tersesa…well, maybe not Rush…Frank certainly means well. The article itself is harmless enough as it stands. It is just another bit in the massive byte wall that is the American media, another impotent set of ideas about what is and isn’t happening in the U.S. today, another demographic covered in the eternal quest for advertiser money.
Yawn.
But I had a cup of coffee to finish. I got to thinking while I was drinking and the following piece popped up almost unbidden from my idle brain.
Read on if you are interested. Or not, as you must. I’ll tell you one thing, though…you will never read, see or hear what I have to say below in any corporate-sponsored media the world over.
Not ever.
Bet on it.
And now…Da Newsz!!!
The media is in the business of selling…selling itself, really.
It is in the business of creating controversy. It is ‘sponsored”…and to a large degree simply owned…by giant corporations, so whatever controversy is created cannot be allowed by its sponsors/owners to seriously damage their short-term profits. But corporations have a quarterly bottom line that they must meet. They must either show a regular profit or the stockholders will change the management team, so the bottom line is almost always short-term. This results in over-amplification of things that range in importance from relatively insignificant events right on through to things that pose serious threats to the very survival of humankind.
I call this the “Snow. Snow! SNOW!!! syndrome. Fifteen or twenty times a year in the northeast U.S. all of the media weather forecasters predict serious snowstorms. “Watch this station for further details!!!” they shout. “Snow.
Snow! SNOW!!!
And of course, they are only a correct a couple of times. But they get ratings.
This principle applies to everything on earth as far as the media are concerned. It is all grist for their hype mill. If it captures an audience, it is good.
“Flu. Flu! FLU!!!
“War. War! WAR!!!
“Obama. Obama! OBAMA!!!
The coverage can be pro or con on any subject covered. Like the old publicity agent line…”Say anything you want about me, but spell my name right.”
And, with large subjects like politics and war they can get mileage out of all sides of the issue. The only “developments” that are bad for the media are no developments.
Less than 12 months ago it was “Obama. Obama! OBAMA!!! The greatest thing ever since processed cheese!!!” And now? “Obama. Obama
Turn off your own feedback machines. That is the only thing that I can offer besides the advice that you should wake up every morning, try to fully accept the ancient warrior credo that “Today is a good day to die” and then go on about your daily business with as little interference from the media noise machine as it is possible to have in this stupidly noisy culture.
Stop this noise before it gets so loud that it brings down the building. In your own lives. If enough people manage to do that…and I am not very sanguine about that possibility, myself…then maybe we have a chance.
Maybe.
Otherwise?
The guaranteed end of this feedback loop?
Bet on it.
You been warned…
S.
In an off-off-Broadway play, the bit actor is the star.
So it is in off-off-Beltway musicals like this media show.
A Funny Thing Happened To Me On The Way To The Zero
by Media Mostel
SEE ya…!!!
(I hope.)
Later…
AG
I appreciate your re-hashing of Upton Sinclair’s stance on the media from “The Brass Check” but it does leave me with one question.
Why are you always advocating a “news strike” and yet continue to consume it?
And are is that supposed to be a “strike” against just CORPORATE media or all journalists? Because I know some fine outstanding reporting work being done by independent people and organizations.
I’m not so sure PROFIT is the only thing driving what you dislike about the “news”. There’s an inherent cultural bias ongoing as well that is far more subtil than just counting dollars 🙂
Pax
Why do you think that I “consume” it?
Does the scientist “consume” the viruses that he examines?
Of course not.
Not unless he wants to be a dead scientist.
Do I mindlessly watch the hypno-news and hypno-ads?
Never. Ever. Bet on it.
You also say:
Do you really think that I am “rehashing” Upton Sinclair? Am I “rehashing” Plato, Socrates, Mark Twain, Hafiz, Abe Lincoln, Shakespeare, Gandhi, William Burroughs and Jesus H. Christ as well if I speak the truth in good, understandable (and sometimes…hopefully…entertaining) English?
Gimme a break here, sister. I am not rehashing anybody. I’m my own man. Bet on that as well.
The rest of your post is equally off the mark.
Go watch Keith Olbermann and leave me the fuck alone.
Just because you apparently live a totally derivative mental life does not mean that we all must.
Thank you and good night.
AG
I appreciate the diagnosis of my mental life LOL
Your metaphors however are indicative of what I was ASKING you in my original comment.
Viruses are not breeding to be “consumed” by scientists observing them with microscopes. The only way viruses can be “consumed” by viruses is to use them as food or as a sympathetic parasite.
On the other hand, observing “news” IS the very definition of consuming it. There literally is no other way to consume it. Reading text only articles in a language you don’t understand is not done.
The “consumer” of such news may be savvy, insightful, ponderous and wary or may be gullible, naive, easily tricked and a simpleton, it’s just a question of where one is on a continuum yet a consumer is a consumer.
I am continuing on this track of referring to news as a “product” and the observer of same as the “consumer” because that’s how you refer to it, by the way.
I guess my original question could be rephrased as such:
If you walk into McDonald’s armed with every nutritional fact about how the “food” there is poisonous, toxic and supporting a vast slave-driving empire but you still CONSUME their products, is that really any different than a blissfully unaware person next to you eating the same hamburger?
Boycott means no consumption at all – not more “enlightened” consumption. Rattling off data about grams of fat while wolfing down a Big Mac is a very strange dichotomy to one such as myself 🙂
Pax
of the media and look around, soj.
But I neither eat any of the shit that it offers nor do I strap on any of its Happy Meal straitjackets.
You seem to think that this is impossible. It may well be so in your case…the prisoner almost always comes to think that all the world resembles his or her prison, which is why most ex-penitentiary inmates walk the streets as if they were the exercise yard of their prison, ever wary of the no longer likely shank to the ribs, always prepared to fight at the least provocation for position (and thus survival) in the vanished hierarchy of prison life…but it is not so in mine.
You do not want to believe this?
Feel free.
But remember…the ex-convict never believes that others do not share his wounds and paranoia.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
P.S. Your opening line about re-hashing Upton Sinclair shows where you are coming from here. You want to somehow attack what I am saying. The rest? Just tactics.
I will repeat what I have written on the web literally hundreds of times.
If the consumer class (Of which the leftiness bloggers are a prime example…primarily white, college-educated, over 35 and well-off enough to be able to own the equipment and spare the time to post on various blogs) were to stop consuming both the news and the products of those who sponsor it:
1-It would lay an economic message on the media to which they would be forced to listen.
and
2-Maybe said consumer class would wake the fuck up after a decent interval of hypnomedia non-consumption and realize that McDonald’s and Keith Fucking Olbermann are just two poles of the same rotten food chain.
You are what you eat?
Well…you are who sponsors you, too.
MSNBC is owned by General Electric.
General Electric is, has been and always will be an equal-opportunity purveyor of goods.
Read on.
As long as it makes money, GE is on it.
Turn the whole rotten thing off.
Go eat something else.
You be bettah off.
Here’s some food for you. My own “media” of choice.
Peace.
It’s not what’s for dinner.
What’s in your mental wallet?
AG
At this point in my life there’s not much left there in my “mental wallet” LOL.
Honestly, like I alluded to before, I’ve devolved into a kind of Tom Friedmanesque style, wherein I get most of my news from taxi drivers. Seems to work for me even if it doesn’t make me particularly THOROUGHLY informed LOL.
I will just say about the Upton Sinclar reference that I will hereby quote the fabulous Lauryn Hill:
🙂
Pax
No.
Everything that you do has more than likely been done, and that goes for almost all of the people on this planet. A little talent and a lot of luck put me in a place where some people who have been doing this sort of thing for centuries…waking people the fuck up, to put it country simple…helped me to actually approach living in the present moment once in a while. When you can do that, suddenly “the new” is no longer impossible.
Yup.
AG
Mr. Gilroy,
Nice to hear from you again.
It may seem a strange comment, following what many might think a quite harsh one posted previously to this one by you, but I tend to mind my own business.
It is not a strange comment at all, and thank you.
I always find it “nice to hear from” people who do not suffer fools gladly, myself. Joe Bageant is my favorite contemporary writer on the subjects covered in the leftiness blog world, and Jimmy Breslin was my favorite in the generation before. Neither one of them have tended to pull many punches. Soj wrote same lame shit…badly reasoned…and I called her on it.
So it goes.
I am not here as often as I used to be simply because:
1-I am very busy as a musician.
and
2-What points I need to make have pretty much reached those here who can handle them and I see very few new names posting on the blog, Why would I want to flog the remaining dead horses on a regular basis? You either get it or you don’t, what I am saying. Nothing much new is happening on the political scene…the left is impotently dallying around as usual and the right-wingers are running their slash-and-burn media game w/their usual vicious flair, so what’s new? I really wish Obama would stand up and get in the motherfuckers’ faces, but it appears that he is not going to do so. Had he stopped in the middle of his health care speech when Wilson blurted out that “You lie!” thing and invited him to step up to the mike and prove it or shut the fuck up, the entire tenor of the political game would have changed in that instant. The RatPubs would no longer have been able to run their sotto voce media routines in the full expectation that Obama would not call them out publicly on every one, and back-stabbing is their only really effective weapon. Dragged out into the light they fade like the parasites they really are. Obama would have wiped the floor with that sullen-eyed, low IQ inheritor of the peckerwood lynch mob genetic structure and an entirely new game would have commenced as of that night.
But he didn’t, and down the Jimmy Carter Memorial Primrose Path we go.
Barack Obama isn’t reading this blog, right?
So what the fuck.
Why waste a lot of time writing stuff that does no earthly good?
See ya somewhere…
AG
Mr. Gilroy.
Thanks for replying & I do hope to eventually hear your music one day.
I do hold musicians in high regard, & allow that their opinions on subjects are possibly formed from a different perspective due to the immersion in real life that others may not have experienced.
I also concur with the opinion that there is no eleventh dimensional chess game going on. This is it. And it seems to only be a game.
Obama probably does not read this blog, but he may have laughed when one of his aides mentioned the chess plays, I`ve been hearing for months on many diverse blogs. Right now it seems that Checkers is too complicated.
OT,
How would I find out when you`d next be playing in LA?
Can you imagine Winston Churchill’s response in a similar situation? That crusty old political in-fighter? Can you imagine what would have happened to Joe Wilson if he dared to say the same thing to LBJ or Nixon? Please!!! He would have been on every political shit list in the country for the rest of his life. The IRS would have been on him like white on rice, the FBI would have been so far up his ass their memos would have served as his toilet paper for decades…c’mon.
Obama is blowing it. Any good fighter knows that his regular game will only take him so far, that when it stops working he has to start using new tactics. Obama is proving to be a one-dimensional fighter. Jab, jab, jab, never going inside to land a body punch, never returning a low blow with an elbow or a head butt. In a street fight, that simply doesn’t work. Not at the highest levels it doesn’t. Eventually you have to pick up a baseball bat and say “OK bubba. You want it? It is ON!!!” and start kicking some ass. Until he does that, it’s going to be all downhill for him.
You hear me, Barack?
(The sad, silent rustle of old newspapers and Dem political memos rustling on an empty playground in the late afternoon wind is the only response I hear…)
So it goes.
Why bother?
Later…
AG
.
Winston Churchill once used the phrase “terminological inexactitude” for “lie.”
Sir Winston L. S. Churchill, unquote
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Mr. Churchill was not necessarily correct on all points…but he was some kind of genius. A genius of written and spoken English, if nothing else.
And he was some kind of prophet, as well. He was ahead of his time by 60 or 70 years on the Middle East, for example, and among the only statesmen of his period to see where Hitler was heading before war actually started.
“Terminological inexactitude”
Deep.
Thank you.
AG