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Coin-Operated Brain Wash

I must admit a certain envy for friends of mine who get along just fine without cable. It's almost kind of sweet, in a way, when I mention someone prominent in the news, and they don't know who I'm talking about. Or, they've yet to hear of some major current event that is reshaping the world as we speak. It's like "freedom from information". I can't do it. I'm a news junkie and I think it's important to know what's going on around us. An uninformed population is easily manipulated. But one needs to carefully filter out the 99% crap and find those nuggets of truth. But therein lies the danger. The act of filtering information is antithetical to the whole point of watching cable TV. The reason you have 200 channels is because you don't have the attention span to devote to anything substantive in the first place. And the things that get your attention need to be flashy and edgy, almost seizure-inducing. Here's where I'm headed with this. Most people really do want the truth, but at the same time, they want it flashed at them. That's why so many people get their news from Jon Stewart (myself included). But there's a dark side. FOX News.

Murdoch understands this very well. He knows that a population with the attention span of a Tse-Tse fly is easy to seduce with his brand of food-fight journalism where the loudest voice wins and the winner surely speaks the truth. He also understands the power of language; how the choice of words can alter perception. For example, during the recent outfreakage between Israel and Lebanon, Fox News reporters embedded with Israeli forces used terms like "we" and "us", suggesting that the Israeli side was "our" side and Lebanon was the enemy. Regardless of your preference, reporters who take sides are no longer objective. They're whores. (Notice I said Lebanon, not Hezbollah. Israel and Hezbollah were fighting, but the tanks rolled into Lebanon, where a lot of people like you and I watched their worlds come to an end.)

I know people, whose intellect I respect, become seduced and ultimately brainwashed by this insidious form of "info-tainment". Not only that, they're paying for it, like pumping quarters into a brain-washing machine. I can see the effects of this when I hear people insist they can sum up the world in loud bold-red shouting points, just like they hear coming at them. You simply cannot and it really undermines your credibility when you try (unless you are among others who think the same way).

The road to the truth is paved in gray, not black and white. Radicalism, on either side of an ideology, is destructive and disingenuous. The irony of fighting terrorism (violence) with war (also violence) seems to be lost on many people. It's like the shouting-match news. Whoever is more violent wins.

Yet the daily diet of corporate news, be it Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc., focuses you on the concept of "the war" as if it were a force of nature, like "the hurricane", and not something we allowed to happen through our own apathy. The more it soaks in, the harder it is to change until something really bad happens.

Think about Germany in the 1920s and 30s. This was, and still is, a country full of intelligent people who want the same things we do, peace, prosperity, security and good food. Yet somehow a guy like Hitler ends up doing what he did. We all know how that ended but it did not begin with some kind of military coup or hostile takeover of the government. It was the silence, acquiescence, and tacit approval of the population that allowed the gradual steps to that end. Along the way, they were fed a diet of twisted logic, lies, and patriotic jibberish that became indistinguishable from the truth until it was too late. Even when the concentration camps were liberated, people living in the nearby towns were horrified to learn, for the first time, what had been going on, in their name, to their neighbors, friends, and people like you and me who just happened to have a 'berg or 'stein in their last name. The Germans then were not stupid people and neither are we now. If we think, however, that we are not vulnerable to the kinds of things that have led to disastrous results time and time again throughout history, then no matter how intelligent we are, we are very naive. If you fail to learn from previous mistakes, you are destined to repeat them.