I just read Kill Your TV, by Nancy Snow. A typical anti-TV rant (anyone remember Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television?), the article has an awesome quote from Aldous Huxley:
A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who manipulate and control it.
I feel bad now for having watched The Surreal Life 2 on Sunday. But it had Ron Jeremy, Tammy Faye Baker, Baywatch boober Traci Bingham, Vanilla Ice, Erik Estrada, and Real World Las Vegas's Trishelle (a dumb hot babe who gets drunk all of the time). Ron's porn star nature has already clashed with Tammy's phony "I'm a goodly woman" routine. I can't wait until Vanilla Ice makes her cry on next week's episode. Imagine the mascara. It could set off more mudslides throughout California. And then the prissy Baywatch girl is hellbent on seeing Jeremy's. . . Stop. People are dying in the world. Hideous things are being done right now. Nancy Snow thinks that the media has become a diversion for the masses from the reality of the world. I need my diversions, though (but I don't really need the Surreal World). I did cancel my cable about four months ago. But are we to dwell day and night on the terror going on in the world, some of it caused by our own country? Maybe. If we were forced to dwell on it all of the time, wouldn't we do something about it? If all of our TV viewing for the day was replaced by the images of every person getting shot or exploded in Iraq that day, I'm pretty sure that we would put a stop to it. Then again, we might just treat it like another Steven Segal movie.
Article comments
1 - Jim Carruthers
I think the US government PR-ops people are starting to slip. This was on the front page of today's Globe and Mail (and I couldn't make this up):
No indication that banjo music was playing or Shrub later asked people at the summit to "squeal like a pig". Does Matt Drudge know about this?
Also keeping an eye on the Disinfo factory is PR Watch. Their latest book is "Weapons of Mass Deception".