This was originally written as a comment on the excellent Gore Vidal appreciation Reflections on the legacy of Gore Vidal that recently appeared on the front page of My Left Wing. I have been avidly reading Mr. Vidal since his novel Burr first came out in 1982, and whatever his novels may lack in structure and language they certainly make up for in their clear understanding of American history and of human endeavour in general.
What struck me in this post, however, was his faith…hope might be a more accurate term…in the internet as an alternate media, as an awakening tool that might be used to rouse the vast sleeple of America from their 70+ year-old, media-induced trance.
I fear that he is wrong here. Maybe he is too far removed from the mainstream given his age and wealth or maybe he has simply spent too much time in Europe. I am a footsoldier on the ground in America, and I offer my own perspective as follows.
Read on if you find that there is nothing more…attractive…on TV or in the newspaper at the present moment.
Read on.
Pogo: We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Or somewhat more accurately…
We have met the enemy, and it is the media.
Or most accurately…
We have met the media, and it is us.
If after 2 years of pounding the idea of NEWSTRIKE!!! to a mostly unresponsive so-called left I was still stupid enough to believe that something was going to change among the on-the-ground members of the (equally so-called) opposition, I would be a total fool.
I mean, the vituperation I took from the media junkies over at little orange Kosland regarding this idea was beyond belief. Tepid reactions from a few “Well, of course I don’t watch much TV” types notwithstanding, I will venture a guess that almost the entire population of left Blogistan is as hooked on media-hypnosis propaganda as is any other broad segment of the population.
It is the single most effective control system ever invented by mankind.
Massive in its power.
Somewhere deep down inside almost all of us we “believe” in the essential goodness of the media. This is true for all of us who have not experienced the agonizing process of kicking this habit, at the very least. It hurts, babies. It really does. JUST like getting off of junk, only on another level. It will fuck with your life. Believe it. It will fuck with your friendships, your relationships. Suddenly you wake up one day and realize that you are living on the other side of the mirror from almost everyone and everything that you know.
OUCH!!!
Bet on it.
It hurts!!!
We believe in the media’s goodness…its essential rightness…on a basic, educated-into-us-at-three-years-of-age level.
Believe in SOME portion of the media, at least.
The good guys.
YOU know.
The ones who stand for liberal ideas as opposed to the bad guys like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
YOU know…
Like CBS and the NY Times.
CBS and the NY Times.
The very outlets that have most effectively…most subtly…opposed the dissemination of the ideas of people like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm X and William Burroughs, just to name a few of my own favorites.
The ones who “ARRRRGHED” Howard Dean out of the Presidency.
It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes.
Wake the fuck up.
There are no independent minds left in this Fox Newshole called America.
Not enough of them, for DAMNED sure.
I mean…here it is, folks, right from Mr. Vidal’s mouth.
But if of course 98% the people who POPULATE said internet…that’s US, folks…still turn on the TV and/or settle into a mindless morning read of our favorite printed fecal matter to get our daily dose of corporate-sponsored socialization, then the game’s up.
Which is about where things stand today.
Even those of us who do NOT suck up our news coverage directly from the hypno-media are hard pressed to avoid the clomp-clomp-clompness of it all.
It is all-pervasive.
It is EVERYWHERE.
Everywhere in the same way as was the Roman Catholic church during the Spanish Inquisition or in the lives of the Irish and Italian working classes in pre-immigration and immediate post-immigration days.
Before it was superceded by a stronger, more effective church.
The Church of the All-Seeing Media Eye.
It is everywhere.
It is the sea into which we are born, the water of life, and climbing out of it onto true land is as potentially vicious a transition as must have been the journeys of the first amphibians up out of the sea.
So…I am not particularly sanguine about our chances of success here.
There will come a time…someday, probably quite far in the future…where this control system will begin to collapse. Maybe it will be FORCED to collapse by outside influences…war, famine, other ecological or economic factors…or maybe a real “”Let’s blow up some buildings” kind of opposition will eventually arise here. But until that/those time(s) arrive, we are pretty well stuck with what we have.
Little baby steps, moderated at all times by the highly conservative forces that run the media.
ALL the media.
Including the internet. Witness the fate of dKos for all you need to know about THAT. From Howard Dean to John Edwards in three short years.
Money talks, nobody walks.
Not enough people to affect things appreciably, anyway.
Go read Joe Bageant’s latest essay.
In the Reign of the One-nutted King
The internet as “Free Speech Zone”.
YOU know…out back behind the parking lot?
An excerpt might be in order.
About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture, nevertheless managed to do what most common folks in the world do — send the kids off to school every morning, cursed Baghdad’s traffic, and perhaps a little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great public expense, and for no apparent reason?
This being a free republic, the American protesters stood in the parking lot, packed buttock to belly button inside one of our fatherland’s designated Free Speech Zones, a bad case of branding if ever there was one, and though they are no longer called that, the function is still the same. Jabbing their signs upward, the protesters tried to wedge their message into the wavering thicket of signage above their heads. Between rather strangely meterless chants, such as “One, two, three, four, end the war!” the evil librul protestors were left to contemplate just what those the Plexiglas faced squadrons of police ninjas might do, should one of the dissidents make a cautious move toward the Porto Johns, which were placed slightly over the yellow painted line that assumedly marked the outer boundary free speech in America. Was it better to ease over into the Porto John, or to hold it until the “designated hour of disassemblage”? However ineffective state supervised dissidence may be here, protesting is hard going in America. No Dane’s beer wrecked bladder could survive it.
Pity the poor American left, (who would be considered right wing moderates in most of the world, but in America being against any war makes you a far leftist. Any time American leftists start pointing at the root causes of our national disease, they are neatly handed a fresh bloody war to oppose. Each new generation of the left gets its energies sapped, gets locked into the position of continually opposing one war, then another and another. Ever since World War I they’ve been standing on the street corners or in the parks — or more recently, inside the Free Speech Zones way the hell out at the edge of town. At any rate, they can never come close to naming the dark and profitable tumor at the heart of America, the economic system under which we all live. To survive and grow, the American system needs war, making war inevitable. To keep up the pretense of freedom it needs harmless dissent.
They are playing us, babies.
Playing us.
And their playtool?
The all-seeing TV eye.
Bet on it.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
Wake the fuck up.
AG
