Whitewashed, Part Deux

As specialists of apparent life,
stars serve as superficial objects
that people can identify with in order to
compensate for the
fragmented productive specializations
that they actually live 
--Society of the Spectacle,
Guy Debord 

Well now home entertainment was my baby's wish
So I hopped into town for a satellite dish
I tied it to the top of my Japanese car
I came home and I pointed it out into the stars 
--57 Channels (And Nuthin' On),  
Bruce Springsteen 

Too much information
running through my brain
Too much information
driving me insane
--Too Much Information,
The Police
 ___________________

While Ms. Dolezal's choice to be black might make for an interesting study in Post Modern Culture or perhaps some journal on psychopathology, it is not national news. No moreso than if a woman with black genetics passed as white. Ditto the former Bruce Jenner's gender reassignment surgery and all of the other bosh which fills out the so-called news programming, the pseudo-news.

It fills someone's agenda of anger and outrage keeping the issues of blackness and transgenderedness on the front of the tabloids and news, which are indistinguishable today.

The television news always leads with a shocking event, the tragic or the sensational. On a dog day that might have to be a tornado in Kansas which does not affect the other 49 states (it is called "Tornado Alley" for a reason.) And while these sorts of things might credibly open a local news program, they have no place being featured on the national news 

Yet that is where they now perch, front and center.

All programs could be called "Entertainment Tonight" today, all created to gain your rapt gaze, to fix you and satisfy you as a mute voyeur. There is no need for you to cogitate or communicate what you have viewed as it is all masticated and predigested for you. Fast food for your brain.

One might wonder if there is anything beyond bread and circuses which motivates programing today. Rather than being motivated by exaltation at the inspiring, we are daily dragged through the muck in the media -- the ugliest places that policemen, doctors and social workers are paid to navigate.

In its early days t.v. featured playhouse events and straight news. Commentary was labeled as such. Broadcasting was not 24/7, and it's goal was not to lull the viewer into an insouciant dullness but to provide something provocative and substantive.

But it was not long before game shows and soap operas found their niche, and the hopes for a high-minded educational medium soon faded.

Today we have so much more connectivity than that provided by a few network stations, but our skills at living a good life alongside our media  masters have not increased. The majority of our days are spent in feverish communications via our electronic devices, but what exactly are we accomplishing?

With the new threat of death-by-lifestyle (=sitting while glued to our devices), so much for "better living through science".

As Science magazine reported, in causes of death, "infectious disease has been eclipsed by long-term chronic disease, closely followed by humans themselves." While man's ability to develop technology continues apace, his ability to digest it is limited. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said of our military capabilities, we have guided missiles but misguided men.

e

--Dodd Hall frieze

A frieze over the entrance to the first library at FSU (Dodd Hall) states,"The half of knowledge is knowing where to find knowledge". Until the last couple of decades that was true. One would scour the card catalogs and microfiche and conduct one's own "meta studies" to verify a thesis which one wished to investigate. Finding knowledge was a skill.

However, the "half" which was NOT knowing where to find it was taken care of. People thought about things. Without having to escape to an ashram, they somehow found the time to think and to determine meet concerns and what constituted rightness for themselves.

Now knowledge is a blitz. We have immediate access to a torrent of info from any place, but we do not know how to ask the questions. We lack for the "What" or the "Why"? The implications of this in our media-saturated world is, we don't know how to live.

We have continual media feeds from every source to which we subscribe, but it seems that the rate of flow of data has taken precedence over our ability to enlist our own discretion. There is no time for careful mulling over of the fitness of the question or of the answers. What has taken its place is a mute miasma of data scrolling through our lives on an unceasing dumb feed. Like lava erupting from a volcano, there is no way stop it.


In the meantime, while we are amusing ourselves to death, actual issues are marching across the nation's stage:

-- The UN reports the world faces a 40 percent shortfall in freshwater in as soon as 15 years (World Water Development Report)

-- salmon and trout are facing a die off in Oregon due to unprecedented drought.

-- accessible solar technology is ignored (Power to the People)

-- children are not learning to socialize (Screen Addiction Has taken a Toll on Children)

-- a superpower like the United States cannot rebuild parts of its rail line taken out several years after the last hurricane in the Southeast

In central Florida, Lake Apopka and its Chain of Lakes --what was once a renowned bass fishing resort -- now has transgendered fish and frogs, by no choice of their own (unlike former decathelete Ms. Jenner.) Their plight is due to decades of toxic runoff from the muck farming in the rich soil surrounding the lake.

That's the merest beginning of actual issues which might occupy our thought ... were the Marching Morons to halt and do an about face before their next video game session.

Circuses, But No Bread for You

  

 im ein kemach ein Torah 
(If there is no bread, there is no Torah, Avot 3:17)

And when I have broken the staff of your bread,
ten women shall bake your bread in one oven,
and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight:
and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied 
--Leviticus 26:26

____________________

I'm back at the hotel where, last week, I was privy to the incessant drone of the news feed in the common room, as unaffected yet relentless as the spiel of the Costco greeter in the film, "Idiocracy" ("Welcome to Costco;  I love you"). In equal measure it consisted of:

--The Cleveland Three: three women held captive for a decade by apparently a lone man, a neatly tied up ball of evil from which was also recently cut the Tsarnaev Bros., Saddam, Moammer and Osama bin Laden (our very own Stalins and Adolfs -- que fabuloso!)

--The guilty verdict of the boyfriend-murderin' Jody Arias, replete with news reports worried about those who had been following the Arias trial on social media for the last year or so, much as they had been transfixed by the Casey Anthony trial before it; there will now be a gap in their lives, it seems

--A limousine erupting into flames on a freeway in California

--An unfortunate woman shot in the head with a spear from her husband's spear gun (How could it have happened! Who could've imagined!)

Today, it is Angelina Jolie's breasts -- same-same, sadly.  Adding to the inanity was the repeat footage of an errant golf ball into a body of water (being as there was a golf tournament going on in Jacksonville, this most average of United State's cities as reported by America's most average paper, USAToday.) The shot seemed to symbolize . . . something.

I was here having my broken wrist set, an injury which was the endpoint of an odd 10 days: telephone knocked out for a week, followed by DSL out in 33 states for days. The IT guy who kindly visited when my computer failed to re-sync yesterday said my lack of connectivity was unique.

Road Warrior of connectivity I remain, typing with one hand when a connection offers itself, and oddly not displeased with my limited access; it is an enforced detachment, but much of what is online really doesn't deserve viewing time. How little of what we are fed is important. Maybe this is divine intervention to allow for some perspective.

Postings will be limited over the following few weeks as my wrist heals; there will be occasional postings. Please feel free to use this space as an open forum and comment as you see fit.

Oh, and a USAToday news flash: the excruciatingly middling Tom Hanks (aka "Everyman") and Sandra Bullock have been named by the most middling paper as the Most Trusted Americans by Middle Americans.

And so it goes.  Good night, and good luck.