I’m not saying it is necessarily a good thing that Italians are occupying trains stations and airport runways because they hate Silvio Berlusconi and don’t want him to be their president prime minister anymore. But it does kill one of my theories for why Americans don’t go really nuts anymore. After all, Italians have teevee and video games, too. If they can put down the Wii long enough to shut down an airport, then I don’t know what our problem is. Maybe we’re too fat?
Or maybe our media is just especially hypnotizing?
Italian TV and American TV have a lot in common: superficiality, banality, anti-intellectualism, sensationalism.
(Italian TV did have game shows with partial nudity, so they’re less prudish; if the US wasn’t so uptight, a similar show would be wildly popular here)
But the Italians are not nearly in thrall to their TVs as Americans are.
But they do love them a public spectacle, and Berlesconi is nothing if he’s not a spectacle.
(Italy has a “Ministerio de Spectacoli”, IIRC, that puts on operas and the like. Bread and circuses, come sempre)
Doesn’t Berlusconi own a lot of the media in Italy? So he’s pretty much our Rupert Murdoch.
Sorry, my main point is that I don’t think it’s the media that is the cuase of Berlesconi’s success. His dominance of the media has mostly just been to keep a lid on his scandals, but it doesn’t explain his successes.
Boo:
Here is something to chew on:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/crossroads-gps-announces-first-post-election-ad-buy/
Those of us railing against the “compromise” were concerned about this. Not Rove per se, but what it means for things like Social Security down the line.
Maybe if Obama gets out his guitar and sings Kumbayah with Karl, all those meanies on the right will just get along and listen to Obama explain his famous “move the knight through Dimension 7 and kill the king” strategy which knocks ’em dead every time.
You’d think, what with Roma (the people, not A.S. Roma), and asylum-seekers, and historical north-south issues every bit as bad as ours, Berlusconi would have figured out a more effective divide-and-rule/distract-and-rule campaign.
His game is slipping.
Too many teenage prostitutes. He’s probably in end-stage syphilis.
A Prime Minister Berlusconi is like a President Rupert Murdoch would be (thank God we have that clause in our Constitution that prevents the Governator or Murdoch from being President).
What is different about Italy is that it has a parliamentary system, which causes all of the compromises that in the US happen in the big tent parties to happen after and election and the winning party tries to form a government. So there are active parties of all stripes that oppose Berlusconi.
The second difference is that Italy did not chop off its left wing during the Cold War. Leftwing parties are still active and not delegitimized.
The third is the fact that folks are not in their face talking about Second Amendment solutions, and if they were there would be a backlash against Mussolini-style fascism.
Fourth, the population density in Italy is 200/sq. mi.; the US 76/sq. mi. Italy is a more compact and urban society that the great wide open spaces in mid-America. Logistically, that makes it easier to organize and coordinate sizable movements. The land area is about the size of Arizona or New Mexico. Imagine 60 million people and movements to oust Jan Brewer.
We have a more complex organizational problem and more difficulty in overcoming the fear of direct action in a post 9/11 America. And we are swimming upstream against a labor force that has been stripped of a labor movement over the past 30 years.
in the US in many ways happen during the primaries. The Democratic Party is in many ways defined by who wins Iowa and New Hampshire.
Yep, and guess how that biases the outcome of the election.
Or maybe Americans can’t tear themselves away from their hectic and overbooked schedules. (Little Johnny has soccer today, football tomorrow and piano lessons the next day.) No time to actually stop, read and think about things.
Or the looking for a job, or sitting in despair at not finding one.
While it’s true that Italian news media is dominated by Berlusconi and in many ways resembles Fox News, this is a fairly recent development. Italy, like pretty much all of Western Europe, has a long post-WW2 history of insuring that the large majority of their population buys into their post-WW2 consensus regarding the roles of the government, big business, and the people. A social safety net is a given. Big business provides jobs, yes, but should be regulated. And so on.
By contrast, in the US we have been subject to an awesome 30 year propoganda campaign that started with the humble founding of the Heritage Foundation in 1975, but has grown to encompass all the US media, the Pentagon (which spends tens of billions on various PR activities in the US alone), the CIA (there is no accounting for how much they spend on domestic propoganda, but it is substantial and coordinated with the other right-wing groups), and the religious far right.
The subtle ways in which the US propoganda war has disabled our population are many and varied. Here are just a few of the examples.
If you are old enough you remember “PSA”s. These were “Public Service Announcements” that TV and radio stations were required to run a few times a day. While they were non-political in nature, they had the effect of building a common consensus about things that were good in society. For example, one PSA may have discussed fighting pollution and littering. Or another may have discussed wearing your seat belt. But PSA requirements were tossed at the same time as the Republicans killed off the Fairness Doctrine and allowed the beginnings of media consolidate. Note that all these steps were originally proposed in a landmark paper from the Heritage Foundation in 1983.
Or consider what has happened to high school textbooks. If you attended high school before Reagan your civics course probably spent a large amount of time on civil rights, with special emphasis on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th amendments. There was a clear bias, although it could be argued the bias was pro-founder, in that the critical need for free speech, separation of church and state, and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure were heavily stressed. In addition, discussions of history invariably took a negative view of the anti-labor actions taken by the US and state governments in the early 20th century and also of the conditions of the average family working in the cities at that time.
Today, textbooks have been beaten down by a long campaign waged by the right wing. The bill of rights is discussed briefly, usually an emphasis on American exceptionalism, then they move on before dealing with anything controversial like separation of church and state, why freedom of speech means protecting even real Nazi speech, or why due process is critical to a free society. No wonder most Americans don’t hold these values any more. Meanwhile, the Great Depression is taught mostly as something that just happened, the cause of which is subject to debate, and the evils of excessive capitalism that lead up to it are glossed over.
Of course, the takeover of news media is obvious to anyone who travels abroad and sees how other first world countries report the news. The US media is focused on “action” and “conflict”, but always from the point of view of the ruling class. But on top of that, there are many subtle themes that have been run by the media for decades, stuff that “everybody knows”, which are never contradicted and now accepted as fact by the population. One is that protesters on the left are always outside the mainstream and are to be dismissed. Another is that anyone who works in the military (sorry, my brainwashed mind wanted to write “serves” in the military, as that is the media-approved verb, isn’t it?) is to be revered and honored unless that person criticizes those in power.
Speaking of military, we have the most militarized population, in terms of consciousness and patterns of thinking, perhaps in history. There was a time in the 1970s when parents commonly tried to keep their kids away from playing military games. Such behavior can still be seen occasionally from liberal parents, but today the military is glamorized even more than it was during WW2.
So, back to Italy. Italy has not been propagandized like the US. Their population can see that their government is screwing them royally and they are doing what free peoples do when that happens. In the US, we are no longer free. The subliminal subjugation of the American population is nearly complete. Orwell had it right, he just didn’t foresee the specific methods that would be used to make it happen. But, following an election in which 2/3rds of the population believed taxes had gone up, when in fact they had gone down, it’s easy to see how he envisioned a scene like “We’ve always been at war with East Asia”.
“Speaking of military, we have the most militarized population, in terms of consciousness and patterns of thinking, perhaps in history. “
I’m not sure what you mean by this, and what you base it on. Do you mean in human history, or in American history?
In human history, there are lots of nations that were dominated by militarism. The Hittites, the Spartans, the Roman Empire, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union for much of its history come to mind. Do you really think the American consciousness is as militaristic as those nations?
If you mean American history, look at the period 1828-1868. There were eleven presidential elections, six of which were won by military men.
What is the evidence for a military culture? Do people flock to military parades? Are there a lot of TV shows that deal with military life or glorify the military? Maybe there are, and I’m just out of the loop. It seems to me that movies about the military sometimes take an all-out patriotic stance, but more often try to take a realistic point of view and show what life is like for a soldier.
If the culture has been militarized, I have somehow been oblivious to it.
You know, Huxley was a lot closer than Orwell. People throw around Orwell all the damn time but you need to look a little closer.
That said, I personally consider the society in Brave New World to be pretty good. It needs some adjustments, but for the overwhelming majority of people, life is good.
I have a theory that people in smaller countries are more likely to take matters into their own hands. We see far less civil disobedience in the huge societies like the USA, Russia, and China, because it seems like actually getting results is too big a challenge. In countries like England or or Bolivia or Iceland there is a better chance for the citizenry to bring about change.
i agree with you, this is really problem. these things stop us to earn and learn, our government why do these instructions on us, all are same there is fault of governments and that people who run this.
http://www.pakhot.com
Sure makes you wonder Boo, why they’re all rioting and so many over here are taking it in the bumbum quietly. Something in the water?
Because no matter WHAT the police do, a huge number of people will defend them to the end. All rioting does is make things worse for the side doing the rioting.
I think tarheel dem and green caboose really captured the problem very well: 30 years of propanda, no left wing, and a country too big to achieve the criticalmass necessary.