When you think of torture, you think of devices like the rack, the whip, and now water-boarding. Ah, but today we live in exquisitely sophisticated times in which technology can be marshaled to create the perfect torture. Gradual, bloodless, and ingeniously designed to drive great minds totally mad.
We speak here of your nightly news broadcast...!
There you sit -- after a quiet dinner and a glass of wine -- to visit your world. And what do you get? You get a 30-minute sun-burst exploding out of that screen like a laser aimed directly at what's left of your 9-5 brain. With the very first sounds of the music (yes, now the news comes with music), you just know this is going to be another night of rapid-fire disasters (with that little 60-second smiley tag at the end).
Oil spills...terror attacks...government leaks...leadership failures...new corruption charges...old corruptions charges...mayhem in the streets...and wars that are driving our troops into cycles of suicide. If you could see yourself sitting there, you would see a stunned victim of a mind-assault the likes of which our once isolated little communities had never experienced before.
What makes this psychological torture especially hard for the older generations is that at one time many of them actually saw their world not as chaotic but as their oyster. Unbelievable as it may seem now, people in the West once believed their culture was something special. Something good. Something to lead the world.
You know, the times of Aristotle, Augustine, Shakespeare and Newton; the days of Rudyard Kipling tales of British nation-building and Teddy Roosevelt agendas of American bravado. Not now. Now whatever is West is suspect. Even at home. And so older news junkies are left to wonder: Where did it all go...? Was it really all illusion and lies...? Is every culture and every person just as good as any other...?
Before you say yes, are you sure...?
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Ahhh! You speak of a time when the 'News' was something we watched after an other program, tutted about it, and then waited for the next show, or film to start. There were even, as a rule, some item at the ends of the News, that made us smile....Yes! Smile!
ReplyDeleteNow, we have a Multi-News system by NBC-BBC-ITV-SKY-FOX- and every other letter of the alphabet. And ALL on a 24 hour News Flashes System.
Sometimes, there just is not enough news about, so they repeat each item over and over again, and seem to assume, we, the 'audience' have the attention span of the average Goldfish, by not only repeating each item, but dragging all sorts of experts out of their crypts, and padded cells, to explain each item to us, in simple terms, with graphs, and diagrams, and computer generated details showing the scene with arrows showing were the idiot fell off his tree, or why the tiger in the Zoo, managed to eat the man who fell into the pit, just because he thought it was just a bigger version of his pussy cat at home...and this would be followed by more experts, explaining to us goldfish, about a new Law that our Politicians are going to bring in, making it illegal for Tigers to eat people visiting a Zoo, even if they serve themselves up, with a sign around their necks, saying, "Lunch!...Eat from this end only".
Nowadays, even a simple, non-dramatic item, is News, and always arrives as a 'News Flash', even if it happened over 12 hours ago, and we, the goldfish, are by now, word perfect, and no longer need to make notes anymore.
Its the same with TV Film shows such as some of the Detective dramas shown each day, or any other type of made for TV movie. They show us 8 or 9 minutes, and then gallop off to the adverts for 10 or more minutes, then the program starts again, but they have to remind us goldfish what the story is up to now, then just as we are ready to watch the rest of the story...we stop, and gallop off for more adverts...This is very handy for the TV producers, as a 30 minute program lasts for 60 minutes, and us goldfish have all lost interest by then anyway, and either fallen asleep, or died!
Yes, if we listened to the News, and were able to understand all the experts, we would be excussed to think that the World has gone mad, and its too dangerous to go outside, and we are all doomed!
As to 'culture ?' Well we in the West, are so mixed up with all the 'other' cultures of the people who come to our Countries to escape from their own, and set up a copy of the very thing they tried to escape from in the first place, in our Country...diluting our own culture in the process.
But, the world is still my 'oyster', its just that the little speck of dirt inside the oyster, no longer turnes into a pearl, but into a radio active time bomb, than should not be eaten in any month that starts with a letter from the alphabet....
Alfred ~ Yeah, the oyster doesn't turn into pearls as much as it once seemed. Perhaps the memory of those old pearls are what gives guys like us a big advantage -- at least we have known and can recall better times. While today's generation has many more things than we did, things are not the only thing, are they...?
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