Posted by panch from pool1101.cvx24-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.214.81) on Tuesday, July 16, 2002 at 1:37AM :
On the uses of Language.
Forever grateful to George Orwell for his insight into the new
possibilities our modern era presented on how to use language to wage
war with. You have to have a medium of exchange to do it
with...newspapers, pamphlets...then radio and TV and more TV and cable
and now news programs formatted to be entertaining etc.
Researchers realize the obvious after lots of testing, sometimes.
Cartoon violence was especially harmful because the images were
presented at the same time children were engaged in what they enjoyed
doing most...home from school on a Saturday morning, the messages were
planted in fertile ground...having cereal or a treat in the
morning...avoiding school...like the rat in the cage who learns lessons
better without being zapped. And it wasn't just the violence...what made
violence in settling conflict appealing as an idea was the cartoon...but
what gave you the justification was to protect the supply of the
constant stream of toys and goodies in the commercials that would come
to mean "our way of Life" to you as you grew up...that thing worth doing
all that killing to protect....to keep them goodies flowing that first
poured all over you on a cozy Satyrday morning while you drank hot
chocolate from your Barbie mug.
Now the TV is in the classroom...soon the TV IS the classroom...well
actually it has been the classroom that counts most for some time. Just
ain't official.
There is no way a harrassed and harried family can counter the messages
screamed out on the TV to their children. Not a chance. Even if they
wanted to. In Boardrooms across the country there are highly paid,
highly skilled professionals whose task it is every day to put their
heads together using the latest technology and methods to pry parents
apart from their children...to insinuate themselves into the childs mind
and fashion "reality" in ways the parents can't hope to combat....with
the result that by the age of 13, parents look at their children like
they were strangers who speak their own language, dress their own way,
have their own music, idols, even the drug of choice is peculiar to
each. Parents find themselves living with virtual strangers, the kids
feel the same and the only entity that has really taught the kids
anything is Pop culture as fed through the media.
The result is better for sales, which is what TV is for...not progamming
but merchandising...and not just of products, that's not enough...but of
a way of life, a way of life complete with "tastes" and "markers" and
"characteristics" that apply only to that generation...with marketers
attuned to what the following generation can half want...half be forced
to need when it's their turn to be "themselves"...you know...be an
"individual"...that thing that 50 million teenagers all think they are
when 80% of them just happen to want the same thing, brought to them by
about three major Corporations with various subsidiaries.
It's fun how conspiracy theorists are ridiculed by making their claims
seem to be ridiculous...a plot against those who see plots? I applied to
IBM once as a kid. There was no "conspiracy" at IBM to hire
clones...there was no Company directive...there didn't need to be. The
culture was there already, subtly programmed by the needs of the
Company...there were just "certain people" they felt good about, and I w
asn't one and ten thousand others like me wouldn't have qualified. It
wasn't a "plot" by IBM to freeze us out.
There didn't have to be a plot to exclude Blacks from drinking fountains
in the South...no one sat down in Georgia and said this is what we have
to do. They just didn't want them around, feared and hated them...with
those kinds of feelings being shared by 80% of the people...who needed a
conspiracy? That's what made Jim Crow so tough to beat....Those laws
didn't appear on any books, they weren't passed by any
Legislature...didn't have to be. It was just the way "things were done".
The means and mechanisms just kind of made sense to everyone white, and
in a weird way to most Blacks too...evoloved naturally out of the racism
everyone suffered from, not just Blacks. No one would even have to
suggest they make whites only fountains...who would think NOT to?
Is there a plot in this country to portray Israelis as the only real
victims worthy of sympathy and legitimacy? When a newspaper headline
says, "One Israeli killed and Palestinian Dies"....was that a conspiracy
to phrase the sentance in such a way that the Israeli is
"killed"...which triggers in our minds the thought..."she was killed by
a Palestinian"...in other words murdered deliberately...while the
Palestinian just "died"...maybe all by himself? Am I being a conspiracy
nut to imagine this sentance was deliberately phrased this way? Am I
also a conspiracy nut to point out that 36 Palestinians have "died" in
the last two weeks and no one has mentioned it...that they are being
routinely and quietly murdered by descendants of the people who
complained that they had been quietly and routinely rounded up for
slaughter just 60 years ago?
It isn't a conspiracy hatched anywhere...not as a policy matter. You
don't need to do that. All you have to do is subject children to bad
education for long enough and they'll grow into undiscriminating adults
who are only concerned with how much money they can make eventually...so
anything that makes America "shtrong"...like not rocking its boat...is
best for your bottom line.
Journalists live in neighborhoods too...scratch them all deeply enough
and you'll get an apologist for this country's deeds...doesn't take a
conspiracy at all...it's just what we "believe". And the fact that
anyone of us, born in any other country, at any other time, under any
other religion or system of government, would swallow THAT party
line...should give us all pause before we kill the next guy who had
about as much of a chance of surviving childhood with any notion of all
the possibilities and potential for being a "human"...for who he or she
COULD be.
There is a "Person Making Machinery" in place of such gigantic
proportions whose engines and devices begin on us at such an early age,
whose images and sly hints and increasing levels of coercion are so all
pervasive and all invasive as to form the very amniotic fluid we grow up
in, that most of us haven't a hope in hell of knowing who "I" am. This
isn't a plot...it isn't a conspiracy....doesn't have to be. It's just
what we've come to accept as normal.
That there doesn't have to BE a plot...is the best plot of all.
-- panch
-- signature .