|
This is such an interesting thread to think about, because it suggests so many things. I was just thinking about something similar to this, but more related to the way the corporate media erases your whole memory, the entire vast meaning of the past, and even your sense of what the world is. I had realized at some point that because of media and its non-stop "eternal present with no reference to the past" so that it can propagandize and sell products ALL THE TIME, that I had completely lost the sense of being able to FEEL what an era was like, what society was like during any certain decade or other period of time, the way I always could before. I used to be able to "place" things as I thought about them, to sense immediately that something I was thinking about was "a little ahead of its time," "this was just about to be really popular," "this would have been really controversial if someone had mentioned it then, but not a few years later," etc., but ever since about the 1980s and the total corporate takeover of "public" media and the cutting out of the public from it, I no longer have any sense of things, of what my own country is even really like anymore. All I know are commercials and anti-tax/anti-Government/anti-"Democrat Party"/anti-feminist slogans from the corporate boardroom. There is no longer even a sense of an active self, as none of us really find ourselves represented on the corporate media anymore--only them and their messages TO us--and since most DUers are aware that the corruption and cutting off from the public good are exactly because of corporate influence, then you realize that these things just meld together, and the voice of corporate media, and the voice of Government secrecy and belligerence, are the same.
They not only censor by keeping things secret, and keeping them from you, but they censor by pretending to report things, but really only "spinning" them, not describing but only CHARACTERIZING them, and having only a very small group of the same commentators, over and over and over, saying the same things, over and over and over, until eventually your sense of the whole world collapses, and you feel you are not being exposed to the larger world but instead being shoved into a tiny little box, that there are only about ten people in the world and one perspective, and that you are boxed in, hopeless, and the "only one who speaks" is all-powerful, owns everything, and will always win. You start to feel that things are actually pre-determined. They flip back and forth, as a trained slogan-using campaign, first laughing at all protesters as "1960s hippie holdovers," then, when Bush is hated by the whole country, suddenly the snide characterization is gone, but like fairy dust sprinkled over it, there is no reference to it again, as if it never happened and must not be admitted to. Feminism is always referred to as "old" and "of the past," no matter how stupid that sounds. Everything is suddenly "robust," "the way forward," "the roadmap for peace," or some other odd little phrase that suddenly pops up then vanishes just as quickly, that makes you realize that they are all reading from the same playbook.
Eventually your own mind just shuts down, from all the pre-characterized assault. You don't even bother to fight some of these lies anymore, if you can no longer even remember your own opinions and memories. "Reagan was popular, and a straight-shooter," when Reagan was neither; "Bush rallied the country after Sept. 11th," when really the first thing Republicans did while all the tragedy was going on, was raid the Social Security trust fund; "the public schools are failing" when really they only completely failed after the now-total corporate interference and imposition of advertising in place of lessons we find now, etc. Things are not only censored, but you only remember the sales campaign, not any actual, researched reporting. If things come out later--as they are now, for example--it is far too late and many people do not believe them because they contradict the long-accepted media routine!
Well, this was a post that kind of got off the actual message, but I think they are all related, first because the corporations that make us all ignorant as a matter of course on the "entertainment" media are the same as the consultant "spinners" of Republican etc. lies, and so the maker of the one is the maker of the other, and second because none of this will ever be solved until our Nation takes over the public forum again--away from corporate lobbyists and entertainment media--and starts teaching and nurturing our citizens for the public good, and not corporate profit, again.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
