Susanhu’s frontpaged diary, Wanna Boycott Chris Matthews?, speaks of her alarm as she realizes that so-called “neutral” media newspeople like Matthews seem in reality to be parroting the White House line, albeit in a subtler manner than say Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter. She seems surprised somehow, yet this has been business as usual…increasingly business as usual…since at least the beginning of the resistance to the Vietnam War here in the U.S. I wrote a comment, she replied, and I wrote another. In those comments I developed an idea that has been occurring to me with more more and more strength and regularity as I have watched the corporate media run their game from the 2000 election on.
It seems as if it might be a good idea to share this exchange with the whole audience here, so…
More below.
I wrote:
Jesus!!!
FUCK Chris Matthews.
BOYCOTT THE WHOLE GODDAMNED MEDIA SYSTEM.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
Really.
When are you folks going to get it through your heads that Chris Matthews, Katie Couric and the rest are just interchangeable parts in an entire SYSTEM THAT IS PREDICATED UPON MISINFORMING THE AMERICAN PUBLIC (LEFT RIGHT AND CENTER, UP AND DOWN THE EDUCATIONAL AND FINANCIAL LADDER) FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE IDEAS AND GOALS OF THE PERMANENT, CORPORATE-OWNED GOVERNMENT.
Which I suppose would be alright if said PermaGov wasn’t totally anti-human in its goals and tactics.
You know those Hollywood sci-fi flicks about a future where machines take over and use humans as tools?
They are not fiction, and this IS the future.
Wake the fuck up.
Do not collaborate with the enemy. And the primary tool of this “enemy” is false information. Let them use their tool on you…and it is a very effective and very subtle tool, by the way, so do not fool yourself into thinking that you are somehow immune because you’re so goddamned evolved, because you are not…let them work on your subconscious with it and you are a goner. Left, right OR center, rich or poor.
A goner.
As in gone.
Outta here.
Done for.
Absent.
Without leave.
Without even LEAVING.
You CANNOT reform this enemy.
You cannot reason with it.
And you cannot cut off one of its tentacles and think that you have won, because it will simply replace that tentacle with another, more effective one.
There are a THOUSAND Chris Matthews/Katie Courics/Rut Limpboughs etc. waiting in the minor leagues, ready and waiting to play ball with the machines for a dollar three-eighty more than the average wage earned by the rest of the peasants.
They are our house niggers, working for the overseers who are in turn working for the man (The machine, in this case. The REAL Superman/Ubermensch), and we are the field slaves.
Time to burn down the mansion.
TIME TO TURN THE ENTIRE FUCKING MACHINE OFF.
O-F-F OFF!!!
NEWSTRIKE!!!, goddamnit.
It is the ONLY answer.
AG
Susanhu answered:
But it is vital to monitor these “house niggers” because they are who most Americans hear.
Most Americans 1) don’t have the time or 2) the inclination to do the digging necessary to come up with your perspective, Arthur. Sad but true. They BELIEVE what they hear on their AM raadio and TEEVEEEs.
One GOOD THING about Chris Matthews: He does have Amy Goodman on fairly often, and he lets her talk. It’s an outstanding program when he does. And Amy doesn’t play their game at all … she lays it all out. It’s beautiful to watch her go eyeball-to-eyeball with a Repug.
And I replied:
If it is “beautiful” to watch Amy Goodman in a situation like that…it is beautiful in the same manner as it is to watch a fine athlete on a consistently losing team.
It’s not working, Susan.
Sorry.
I wish that it was.
They include a token truth-teller as part of their scam.
As a sop to people…well-meaning, good people…like yourself.
They include those tokens in a small enough (And nudge nudge,wink wink enough…”Aren’t those wacky liberals just so CUTE sometimes, Henry!!!”) setting so that they they do NOTHING to change a single media-tranced out mind.
One piece of truth surrounded by 960 lies.
The truth of the matter simply gets lost in the clutter.
The empty chatter.
Sorry Susan…we have to dismantle this media system.
Any which way we can.
Or it is going to destroy us.
We are aleady to some degree the slaves of this machine. We are being progressively more often used simply as gofers. Technicians who help to keep the machine running instead of vice-versa. More mobile than robots…so far…we fight and die to provide the blood that runs this mega-machine.(Oil at the moment, but if that runs out we can fry ourselves with radiation as far as the machine is concerned. As long as there are enough of us left to help keep it running.)
Our lives, our finances, entire cultures are in thrall to the machine, Susan.
Gotta stop somewhere.
May as well be now.
And the corporate media is the tool the machine uses to keep us working for ITS goals rather than for the good of living creatures.
Is it a “sentient” machine?
No, I suppose not.
Not yet, anyway.
Is a pride of lions “sentient”?
No…but does it really matter to the prey?
Are we to be the hyenas and jackals for this machine?
Those who clean up the scraps it leaves behind? The antelopes and water buffalo it eats in its own self-interest? The bacteria in its gut that helps it to digest its power meals?
That’s where it’s headed, Susan, and Amy Goodman be DAMNED.
She’s smart; she’s clever; she means well…and she’s not getting ANYTHING done.
Who’s in charge here, again?
Who’s headed for the Supreme Court?
Who’s dying in a Blood For Oil War?
Whose lives, jobs, education and culture have literally disappeared in a mechanical haze of automatic questions and answers?
Since JFK was killed…HOW MANY ADMINISTRATIONS HAVE EVEN BEEN RUN BY DEMOCRATS, let alone been in clear and effective opposition to this corporate machine that transforms men and women into faceless functionaries?
Maybe some of Carter…what he could manage before the machine got rid of him… and whatever Clinton could manage and still (barely) survive two whole terms? As opposed to a LOT of Nixon/Ford/Reagan/BushI/BushII, their Rumsfeldian minions and whatever is about to happen if we do not find a way to stop this media movement from maintaning its hypnotic hold on the minds and souls of the vast majority of Americans.
When I say “Wake the Fuck UP!!!”…I am not just whistlin’ Dixie here, Susan.
More like Taps if we’re not careful.
As in RIP, Homo Sapiens.
That’s wehere it’s headed, m’dear…
I’d say “BET on it”, but…who’d be there to collect if I am right?
Fight, fight against the synthesis of the light.
Later…
AG
P.S.I have been in Holland, now. And the UK. For a couple of weeks. MUCH better here in Europe. Their anti-machine checks and balances are working. MUCH better than those in the U.S. Much less trance-state going on.
That you CAN bet on.
Just look in peoples’ eyes.
They look back at you instead of judging you as some sort of inferior television image. They listen to what you are saying, too.
All you have to do is keep a critical mass of people free of this thing and it begins to break down. Not even a majority. Just enough.
Let’s try it.
What have we got to lose but our credit cards?
And what stands to be gained in exchange?
Read my sig.
Replace the word “Power” with the words “The machine”.
Yup.
The machine concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.-Arthur Gilroy
The only effective “demand” of which I personally can conceive…one that would run an end-around play on the mass hypnosis system…is a media boycott. A NEWSTRIKE!!! The larger the number of people who turned the machine OFF in their own lives, the less influence it would have…and the less money (power) it would garner as well, if the boycott was indeed truly sucessful. Reach a critcal mass, and it would fall.
Anyone with a better idea…one other than storming the WMD-protected barricades waving ploughshares and imaginary samurai swords or trying to talk the media into recognizining its own error (and it is NOT in error if its goal is the protection of the machine rather than the protection of humans)…anyone with a better idea, feel free to chime right in here.
I’m all ears.
Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.-Frederick Douglass
That’s about all I have to say on the matter.
Popular culture quite often unconsciously lays out the facts of real life in mythic form before they become clear to the mass of people. That the most terrifying of these myth-movies starred the machine-formed (steroids) hulk Arnold Schwarzenegger as a machine bent on FIGHTING the machine when in reality he was so much PART of the machine that it considered running him for President is irony on a higher plane than I can even BEGIN to consider.
Maybe there IS a God.
And maybe it’s just a very, VERY evolved machine. One that understands the value of the living.
Past my ken.
But something is happening. And we do not know what it is.
Do we, Mr. + Ms. Jones?
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
And neither do you need a mechanic to know when the machine is broken.
Let’s turn it off until we can fix it.
Before it blows right up in our faces.
Later…
AG
Please…rec this up.
Again…we need to talk, here.
I will be in transit for the next day or so. Back in the US(SR).Feel free to talk among yourselves, if y’know what I mean.
Thanks…
AG
I really do agree with most of what you are saying. I really think it’s gone beyond the tv, the controlling stuff.
My spouse is a tv robot- seriously. I asked him why he watches so much crap. He said when he sees a tv on his eyes go immediately to it does not matter what is on. He is very apathetic about almost everything.
Anyways, I think we are being HAARPed or something. Sometimes I hear the tv after its been turned off and I am almost completely deaf. Seriously. But I notice how agitated I get and I’ve noticed that even though I can still rant and rage I seem stopped in my tracks when I plan on going to a meeting or demonstration.
And then I think it’s the computer also. Years ago I did some research on subliminal messages. We all know how commercials use the technique. You add those messages and a steady pulse from something like HAARP or ELF and the majority of us are ‘stuck’.
I’ve been pooh-poohed about this but I know it. I just can’t seem to prove it.
I’ve wondered if there could be some sort of energy converting gizmo – the tv is hooked to an exercise machine and only works if the exercise machine is in use.
If one had to bicycle to watch a program, one might become a bit more critical about viewing choices. 🙂
Imagine the commentary:
I just rowed for 30 minutes to watch that show. It was a piece of garbage. No more for me.
Arthur, have you ever read the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, especially his amazing novel Valis? That is probably the greatest sci-fi novel ever written, and it could not possibly be more relevant to today’s events. If you haven’t read it, then somehow you are channeling it.
You sound, of course, like a crazy person. Schizophrenia, one wonders, or perhaps some kind of mania? Probably not so-called bipolar. And so forth. You really do sound nuts with your fabulously overheated prose style.
And yet.
And yet … of all the comments I read on this blog over the past months, it is yours that stick.
It is yours I keep thinking about.
You say the Europeans are obviously not in the same trance state as the Americans. Obviously true. Please write more about your observations about that.
Wouldn’t it be something if the thing we’re all fighting is actually the machine intelligence that sci-fi writers have been warning about for decades? (Best example is in the writing of real-life scientist Gregory Benford, who is also a great novelist.) It’s actually plausible. The media-system builds up feedback resonances to the point where it starts functioning like a giant “id.” Weirder than weird.
Maybe I need to take LSD again (haven’t done that in 30 years). I don’t think I’m crazy enough these days to get a handle on what’s going on in my home country….
One of my observations from the last couple decades: a radical may “seem” nuts from the angle of a mainstreamer. However, I get the feeling AG sees quite clearly. Maybe it’s from hanging out with anarchist punks in my youth, etc. I can understand why AG’s writings might appear schizophrenic – after all the radical has broken with reality as defined by the mainstream.
It appears to me that it is the mainstream that is “schizophrenic”.
schizophrenia: 1-a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought (as in hallucinations and delusions), and conduct.
Sounds like life in modern society to me…
🙂
Won’t get much argument from me there!
I am nowhere NEAR crazy. I am a functioning artist. I get up in the morning and I work. At music and at other things. I don’t hear voices, and I am not bipolar. Steady as a rock. I sit in orchestras and bands and play whatever is asked of me…very, VERY well, bullshit or not…in order to finance my art. The people who hire me don’t have a CLUE what I am thinking. Because I am sane enough to keep my mouth shut in order to survive and prosper to whatever degree I wish to do so. And if I want to, I can write as plainly as any good journalist.
But I do NOT want to, and the reason that I do not want to is because the only way it seems that I can manage to get through the ongoing trance state of modern, media entranced people…and that includes almost EVERYONE who watches TV on any regular basis for “enjoyment”, for pleasure, especially commercially sponsored TV…is to SHOCK!!!
Shock and awe, baby.
Shock and awe prose.
Do you know why my stuff sticks?
Because I am telling the truth and I am saying it LOUDLY.
Loudly enough to get through all the dreck that spins through our collective heads. Placed there by the media.
That’s my aim, anyway.
And our enemy is NOT the all-encompassing machine intelligence written of in so many sci-fi thrillers. It is MUCH more frightening than that, because it is not an “intelligence”. That’s just a metaphor, an anthropomorphic attempt to make the incomprehensible understandable.
An intendency might be a better word. A set of tendencies toward survival by any number of corporate entities that turns the human beings who work for them into corporate drones.
I highly recommend the film “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, a great documentary that catalogues the rise and fall of Enron, one of those corporate entities that stepped a little bit over the line. Look into the eyes of the Skillings and Fastows who really ran that game. Watch the traders and hear their voices on tape. They are occupied territory, every last one of them. And what occupies them is something that we cannot grasp. It is NOT a “machine”. It is a CORPORATION. Part machine, part human, part legal gerrymander…and VERY powerful.
Frighteningly so.
That machine thing is just a metaphor.
It’s worse than that.
MUCH worse.
You can kill a machine.
But a corporation produces OTHER corporations before it dies, and it leaves behind thousands of drones as well. Who then man the NEW corporations.
Scared yet?
I am.
AG
P.S. Lay off the LSD. You are even MORE easily hypnotized behind drugs. Clean and sober. Mostly. You be bettah off…
There is something important about the observation that most Americans seem to be in a trace state. Your efforts to get at that problem are interesting, but I don’t think you see the whole problem clearly, nor do I.
My wife and I went on a road trip today, and I found myself talking about your ideas for almost an hour. Have you read Teilhard de Chardin?
As I said before, if you have any further thoughts and observations on the differences between Europeans and Americans with regard to the trace state, I’d like to hear them.
I hear what you’re saying about selling one’s soul to a corporation. But I think something more fundamental is going on at a spiritual level. I can’t see what it is, but the idea keeps bubbling under the surface in my mind, and your posts seem a piece of the truth.
I was joking about the LSD and half-joking about your notes sounding nuts. Thanks for responding!
I hope that you will continue to explore this too.
Some thoughts I have had bubbling around:
There is a human need to “belong” with others – a need for community.
“Work/career” has taken, imo, a much greater role in modern lives than in the past. And it is often separated from the community in which one lives.
Tv programs and characters are often discussed by people as if they were real. There seems to be a satisfying of the need to belong in watching tv. Though it is physically passive, our minds seem to be able to engage in a way that makes it seem interactive. Neighborhood becomes the world of tv.
I wonder if people are in a trance or just mentally fatigued.
You write:
“I wonder if people are in a trance or just mentally fatigued.”
Is there a difference?
And if you want to PUT someone into a trance state, what better way to make them receptive to the change than to first tire them out?
Destroy their defenses.
First psychological shock and awe…then you invade.
AG
I was thinking of mental fatigue as a consequence of work, the culture of complaint.
The constant bombardment of advertising with its core of creating unhappiness – you need to buy…
I have long considered tv the modern opiate of the masses.
As with any drug, “just saying no” is only one piece.
And…as with any drug, the most IMPORTANT piece.
AG
Yes, I have read de Chardin. But not in depth, and not in the original language. However, I have studied for many years with people that I consider to be his equals, if not in some respects his superiors. Now that may seem a presumptuous thing to say, but the tradition loosely (and inaccurately, in may respects) called Sufism (for want of a better way to identify what is a VERY broad approach to a certain kind of real knowledge) cuts across any and all barriers of language, culture, so-called “religion” and societal position. There are and have been “Sufi” teachers whose outward position in society was no better than that of a herdsman or a merchant, yet their teachings…to those who had the ears to hear…made the official philosophers and thinkers of their day seem childish in comparison.
My further thoughts about the differences between Americans and Europeans would fill a book. Maybe as I find the time and circumstances warrant I will post something in that general direction, but suffice it to say that because of language and societal differences, the series of accidents that resulted in the massive media machine under which Americans live were more than slightly different in most of Western Europe and as a result Europeans as a whole are less hypnotized by the media. The depth of the hypnosis appears to be shallower in most individuals, and there is a smaller percentage of the population that is constantly living in a serious and ongoing trance state of this sort.
As far as “corporations” and the selling of souls is concerned…this is ALL metaphor. I could just as easily say that demons have possessed these people, and be as accurate. Or simultaneously as INaccurate.
Or aliens.
Or creatures from another dimension.
Or that it is just one big accident…one of thousands in human history…and that we must either very soon clean it up or be prepared to perish from its consequences.
Each way of stating this FACT…that there are many human beings in positions of great power who are consistently working towards goals that are plainly anti-human…would resonate with certain people at certain levels of consciousness.
Just a cursory look at the work history of Donald Rumsfeld…he has never achieved ANYTHING that did not harm large masses of human beings, from being a warmonger to working for petroleum interests and other massive polluters to working for Big Pharma and succeeding in getting the deadly poison aspartame into the bloodstreams of about 50% of the human beings presently walking this planet…is enough to prove this point.
There are literally THOUSANDS of people like him, hard at work in the bowels of this corporate system.
Corporeal reflections of the corporate entities.
Of this machine. ( Again, for want of a better word.)
There is no one way of saying this. It is in fact too large a phenomenon to be easily or completely apprehended by ANY speck of universal dust that calls itself a human, as far as I am concerned.
So I take my shot where and when I can.
A far as the LSD goes…the whole psychedelic movement was an attempt to understand what is happening here, in my view. It was a failed attempt by a relatively young culture to use drugs to awaken. This attempt always happens in young cultures, and when those cultures become thoroughly saturated with the drugs, they either recover and realize the futility of the attempt or regress and fall into a sort of barbarism. I am sure that before there was a Buddah or a Christ or a Moses or a Mohammed or a Lao Tze or a Rumi in any of the cultures that THEY informed, there was hashish, opium, ahuyusca, peyote and the thousand other physical, chemical ways that ultimately do not work to awaken. We learn by doing. In my own small subculture, the so-called jazz world, there was heroin. It WORKS, heroin. It opens the mind and the soul in a certain way. For a while. But in the end, it fucks you up. Don’t see many junkies in this culture, two or three generations after Charlie Parker and about 99% of the other bebop geniuses were TOTALLY strung out.
We learn by doing. By observing. Bird dead on the Countess’s couch at 33 was a very plain wakeup call to most of them. And even PLAINER to the generations that followed.
And as far as being “nuts”…
Well, it’s all in where you stand. isn’t it?
It is commonly said that beauty resides in the eye of the beholder.
Indeed..and so does sanity.
Thus the game continues.
And what IS the game?
Evolution.
The life of Life.
Have fun…
Later…
AG
The Sufis. I wonder if that includes Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Thanks for these further comments. I’ll keep reading your posts, trying for a better understanding of what you call “the machine.”
Yes.
And others who have come out of them yet rarely even mention their names.
I studied for a while with someone who came DIRECTLY from that tradition and was simultaneously a very high functionary in a multi-national organization that is often reflexively considered “the enemy” by most left wingers.
” ‘Tain’t Whatcha Do, It’s The Way Atcha Do It.” Trummy Young with the Jimmy Lunceford band, 1930s.
Or…
HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare-Hamlet, Act I, scene V
By the way…have you read “Shakespeare as Sufi” stuff?
Google <Shakespeare + Sufi>. About 132,000 hits.
Lots of work being done tracing patters through both traditions.
I ALWAYS thought so. Nice to see scholars catching up.
AG
Yeah ol Arthur sounds a little nuts. He has the balls to see what I feel though. He can’t be anymore nuts than the looney’s that have taken over the asylum so to speak. Over and over again I have said that all the protests in the world(which I have bee participating in) against the Cabal of Fascists in the WHite House won’t do us a lick of good because the media fuckers won’t cover it.
Now, if we sit down in front of their headquarters and affiliates offices with signs denouncing the propaganda machines and their sponsors swearing off those products they might be more inclined to pay attention.
Last night I turned Tweety on and he has a new segment with the MSNBC “HotShots” who are Scumborough, Rita Cosby and Fucker Carlson. I turned it off. It was a Dem bashing contest and who could get the most air time. That was the icing on the cake. They are bashing Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore as the “extreme left”. With voices like that spewing the propaganda we don’t have a chance. Again, the tv stations and newspaper offices should be our targets right now.
I don’t even SOUND nuts, alohaleezy. Is it nuts to say “Listen…you are being lied to and you cannot stop them from doing so because they are supported by HUGE money and power. . BUT…you CAN refuse to pay any attention to them. And if enough people DO stop paying attention to them, they will lose their power.”
How nuts is THAT?
Duh.
AG
AG – one of the last things I watched on tv was the presidential debate – Reagan and Mondale.
Some observations from 20+ years without regular tv:
*They have been showing up all over the place: restaurants, bars, dentist office, airport, car repair waiting room, even IN vehicles…
*The ads have become very confusing; I often have no clue as to what is being advertised, especially if the sound is muted; the ads are very visually “flicky,” moving from image to image which I find uncomfortable.
*The level of dialogue in programs has been reduced to one-line quips. The “humor” is often derogatory, passing itself off as “witty.” There is often a “whiny” tone in at least one of the characters voices. There is a great deal of complaining.
*The sets, particularly houses/kitchens, are large – advertising by exposure.
*Sports has become so commercialized that arenas/stadiums are named for corporations and a tremendous number of products are sold under brand labels.
*Sporting events have gotten weird – contests and competition over just about anything.
*Even the weather is presented with a faux drama.
*The news is superficial with an emphasis on visuals.
I read an interview with a man who has been watching and analyzing tv programs for over 30 years. (Sorry, the name escapes me.) He is the one who provides the statistics on the number of murders people watch over time.
In this interview, his concern was not so much the violence as it was the limited roles and who gets to play the role. Tv as cultural storyteller – now that is frightening!
I didn’t stop watching tv from a moral stance, I really never much cared for it. My drug of choice has been fiction – and I have read plenty of trashy novels!
I turned off the tube in 1984 – in 2000 I got Bush for president. Turning off the tube is not enough AG.
I am grateful for those here who do watch the news and the talk shows and keep me informed. Knowing what the talking points are, I have been able to write LTEs and talk with people countering the talking points.
Turning off the tube would BE enough if enough people DID it.
AG
The old rule: watch and believe. The new rule: don’t watch at all, ever.
Neither rule will suffice, as rules-based ethics and rules-based mental programming are a MAJOR part of the problem. A reactionary see-no-evil rule will not be substantially better than the old rule. Boycott the advertisers, but watch some of the drivel with a critcal mind in order to better understand the problem.
This gets those of us who watch to learn into the “abyss” problem. But it is better to be aware of the nuances of the abyss than to be ignorant. Just be careful not to fall in. (If you do fall in, take some cheesecake with you for comfort, you’ll need it.)
It is not what you see and hear that contaminates you, it is what you DO with what you see and hear that is determinative. The record that sites like “Media Matters” and “Crooks and Liars” are keeping is very important.
To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy.
Good point!
So we have designated watchers.
As to:
It is not what you see and hear that contaminates
One has to be very, very careful – as with handling any toxins – with lots of time away to cleanse – seriously.
To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy. Agree.
I just really do not want to be a “watcher.” I do so appreciate those willing to watch and report.
YES, I agree wholeheartedly.
Professional snakehandlers in some countries inoculate themselves from a young age with increasing amounts of venom over time, in order to build resistance. They do not SEEK to be bitten with the full strength of an adult snake’s venom but they do prepare the body to survive if such an event happens. Thus, a professional snakehandler learns the ways of handling snakes with less fear of harm than an unprepared farmer.
Every village needs a snakehandler to remove the poisonous snakes from the houses of the farmers, but not every villager needs to be a snakehandler.
However, I do encourage everyone in OUR village to learn the ways of the media snakes. I feel that those who participate here are already inoculated against the venomous propaganda that the media spews, and that we are called to handle these snakes, indeed to remove them from the homes of the farmers even when the farmer does not see the snake.
Only by exercising our powers of perception can we gain the knowledge required to counter the threat.
Arthur, I hear you!
I don’t comment here very much but this post hit a nerve. Most serious people have known about this…ah…phenomenon…for quit a long time (yet it remains and unfortunately grows larger). But, I decided to do something about it anyway. First I got my teaching license (at 34 yrs old) in Art. Why, you may ask Art and not Social Studies. Well my theory was that the powers-that-be would generally leave me alone, not be too bothered by the “wacky” art teacher. I got a job and lo and behold it worked, they pretty much left me alone to “teach”.
Now the hard part, the students. Talk about a brick shit-house, my hurtin’ brain. I would, and still challenge my students to turn off the TV for two weeks. Some can’t do it at all they get angry and irritable like a junkie without dope. Some can for a bit but fail, and some do for the whole time. The ones who do it for any amount of time seem to change very quickly. And a few of the ones that do it for the full two weeks hardly ever go back. They become interested in…get this…the world around them! It is quite amazing this change. Even a few of their parents have remarked on it. It ain’t perfect, but it works!
Anyway, it is not a big thing, but it is what I can do to help.
PS: I’ve been up to it for ten years now. Don’t know how much longer I can do it since I get really very little support. Ah well no one said being a Guerrilla Teacher was gonna be fun.
ED
That’s great Ed! Keep at it. I used to teach, and it’s true what they say, if you can reach just one kid…
My TV’s been of since about April now. Except for some football and one or two select favorite shows now and then. But TV ‘news’? No Way!! Never. Maybe just for some local stories now and again, but really, very rarely. Kudos to you!!
I obviously meant ‘off’… ugh.
First, there is a book that everyone here should know about. It’s called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, by Gerry Mander. It is hard to find, and it is out of print, but it is very, very good. Gerry Mander is an advertising executive who gave it all up. He knows what he is talking about, and has given it a lot of thought.
It is a long, careful, leisurely, book, and it is hard to summarize. I won’t. But that does take me to my first point: Television disrupts the process of thinking, through its urgency and fragmention. “Soundbite” is the soundbite that summarizes this. Stories are interrupted by commercials, and nothing is ever thought through. Thinking things through is not a television concept–partly this is a technical limitation and partly a choice: It is this way by design. TV has to be this way. (This is the realization that forced Mander to give up his career.)
How often on this blog do we complain that people do not think! Television is a world in which thinking is literally not possible, and the more time one spends in this world the less thinking one can do.
There will never, ever, be progressive television. (Air America take note!) It is inherently a medium of propaganda and control. There is no such thing as good television, only television which is not intentionally hostile to the viewer. And of that we have very little these days.
Physically, the blinking screen and flickering lights put one into an altered state of mind that resembles meditation. Unfortunately, unlike meditation, the goal is not to let the mind settle and clear, but throught hypnotic techniques enable others to fill your mind with their information. Not technical information (that has been tried, and it doesn’t work), but attitudes, prejudices, and feelings–which does work. In short, when you watch TV you are letting people hostile to you access your personal memories directly. It is hard to distinguish TV memories from truth–only the verbal part of your mind can do this, and TV is largely non-vebal–and very difficult to uproot TV memories from your mind, even if you want to.
Much more could be said, but I want to mention a “detox” technique. Since staring at a TV screen is actually very boring, TV producers have to find ways to keep your eyes glued to the screen. All these techniques involve motion, because when something moves in your visual field your eyes have to go there. (This is a survival trait all mammals have.) To create the motion they need, they use camera techniques–technical events–for much of the programming–cuts, zooms, pans, fades, split screen, and so on. Now the detox technique is this: Watch for and log how many technical events are used each minute. The naive viewer is generally astonished at how many of these there are (commonly one every few seconds), and becoming aware of how one is being constantly suckered goes a long way towards cure.
In short, it is very dangerous to watch TV. It is also very tiring–probably because it is an inversion or abuse of the meditative state. You should never do it without a reason that justifies the risk.
YES GAIANNE!!!
Precisely.
AG
Ya know I haven’t watched TV in maybe 15-20 yrs, except for some kid shows with my children. Funny thing is I used to think I was clinically depressed, or some thing like it. Went to psychs, meds, Eastern Thought, the whole can of worms. Nothing seemed to work. After I stopped watching I became not-depressed. Now I’m not saying it was entirely TV’s fault, but there seemed to be some connection, at least for me.
By the way I really stopped watching for aesthetic reasons. I just couldn’t take the small screen and small minds on it.
peace
Ya know? I had the same experience with depression and TV. No TV, no depression. I do still watch English Comedies on PBS and once in a while “Masterpiece Theater”. But overall, I think TV is energy and creativity draining. I’d advise most people to limit or eliminate TV from their lives.
You BET there’s a connection.
AG
I’m in my third day now after renouncng CNN, upon the debut of the odious shitbag William Bennett in his new role as official CNN contributor.
Similarly, I decided to forego tuning into Matthews’ show Hardball any more too, and so now the only thing I look at on MSNBC or NBC proper is Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
I do still believe these hacks like Matthews need to be monitored in some way, but, happily, there are plenty of people doing that now thanks to the internet and to the enthusiasm for real discourse the net has provided for so many of us.
So far, after having given up these news outlets, I think I’m just as well informed. Indeed, there’s probably less misinformation streaming into my brain, so probably I’m better informed with less effort.
Seems like a win/win combo to me.
Yup.
Win win.
AG
Here is some classic William Burroughs. It was originally written regarding the use of cut up, edited tapes to disorient human beings, but it applies DIRECTLY to what we get when we watch a few hours of mainstream TV.
ANY mainstream TV.
From The Invisible Generation.
These commands are constantly being imposed by the environment of modern life. If for example your suggestion tape contains the phrase: “Look at that light in front of you . . . STOP . . . Stay here . . . GO . . . Be over there,” and is played back to people waiting at a stop light THEY ARE FORCED TO OBEY THE SUGGESTION YOU ARE MAKING. It’s like giving someone a sleeping pill without his knowledge and then suggesting sleep.
Any contradictory suggestion at the unconscious level produces a moment of disorientation during which your suggestions take effect.
Furthermore, contradictory suggestions are an integral function of human metabolism. . . “Sweat. Stop sweating. Salivate. Stop salivating. Pour adrenaline into the blood stream. Counteract adrenaline.”
Since contradictory commands are enforced by the environment and by the human body suggestion tapes that contain such commands will have particular force. Insult tapes cut in with contradictory commands are especially effective.
All tape recorder tricks are useful: Speed up, slow down, overlay running contradictory commands simultaneously, echo chambers for stations and airports.
“It’s like giving someone a sleeping pill without his knowledge and then suggesting sleep.”
Prescient.
Scared yet?
You ought to be.
More.
Wake the fuck UP!!!
Before it’s too late.
Turn off the “if its ugly its news” feedback system before it turns YOU into that which it propagates as “news”.
Hell, people…it ain’t even NEW.
Same ol’ same ol’, over and over and over and over again.
Slime mind.
You want THAT inside of you, repeated however many times per second the cathode ray scans the TV tube to produce the image?
Holy Roaming Cathode Church of the Divine Repetition.
Step outside.
Get a life.
Before it takes yours.
AG
Contradictory instruction is what makes law enforcement successful. It’s been used to charge peacefull dissenters and justify lethal force in extreme cases, such as the Alpizar shooting.
Mainstream to the culture.
Be sexy. Don’t fuck.
Be independent. Conform.
And so on.
Breaks people down to the point where they can only do what they are most recently/ most often/most forcefully TOLD to do. Some combination and permutation of those three parameters.
AG
Yup. Those are the conditions that create learned helplessness. Creates an organism that simply is so stressed and confused that it won’t escape even when offered a clear way out.
Yup.
Clomp clomp clomp.
Lockdown Zombies On Parade.
America 2006.
Turn it off and stop sniffing the Juju dust.
Turn it O-F-F off!!!
AG