Dreams to Scare us All
I have this sensation that television has greatly changed since I stopped watching it, sometime around 1994 or so. The late eighties and early nineties had a very educated populace on its hands and advertising was very self-aware. "Now WE know you know better to fall for this and we respect that, but we are telling you to buy it anyway because you are so cool you might..." Overtly subliminal, it tended to acknowledge the dirty tricks it was playing on you and was cloyingly ironic about about it's relationship to the viewer/consumer. In the late '90'... in all the magazines..."Irony is dead", they all started to say, "sincerity" is the new black...
People ARE more sincere about their beliefs and convictions and now ...since 9/11...incredibly and devisively so.
Somewhere along the way shortly after the threat of the writers guild strikes what followed was the explosion of unscripted tv. The gladiatorial ultimate humiliation of anyone willing to participate. The advertising that has come to accompany it that I have seen (from my limited exposure to TV) has all the subtlety of a bludgeon to a forehead and is executed with a spirit of meanness and vitriol. TV (in the half hour segments I have been exposed to here and there) presents human beings as teeth-baring monkeys shrieking for dominance on this collossal dirt-heap commanding the viewer/consumer to do their bidding. Or else.
Did you know that 50- 55% of all broadcast news isn't really "news" at all? These are news-like pubic relations "informational" peices that are really either advertising or editorializing for their corporate investors. All of these pieces are assembled by former journalists who work for two major madison avenue PR firms that represent top Fortune 500 companies...as news. How often have you seen stories on new miracle drug breakthrough stories on the news?
I had this dream last night that was terrifying beyond comprehension, and I woke feeling that societal trends are moving the world in this direction. A sense of the apocalypse that grows out of Christian versus everyone else and turns into a free-for-all of destruction unabated on a global scale
In my dream the whole world had deteriorated from a groovy "everybody do your own thing" into planet-wide hostility reality-television style free-for-all. There were those who fought for the side of "good" and there were those who fought for power and control. One character in my dream described the situation like this "everybody knowingly or not, whichever side they're fighting for is fighting for the ultimate extinction of life on the planet. You can have a lot more fun with it if you know that's what you're really doing." This segued into an overhead view of hordes of people in the street in a crush type of mob, literally smearing the bodies of the people to the side against the sides of the building, and grinding them underfoot, into paste. There were warriors who devised weapons fashioned from the ridiculous...like toilet plunger man, who with his arsenal of toilet plungers would harpoon his victims killing them if speared and if they could instead catch them they would be showered with rose petals and urged to passionately kiss the nearest person in arms reach before getting killed by someone else right behind them.
Horrifying dreams, no?
I blame the so-called Christian Right for how bad things are in danger of becoming, and the complacent and lazy misinformed wrong-headed voter for voting on the basis of what they see on FOX News. Hell, half of my family falls in this category.
Wake me up...before we go, go.
People ARE more sincere about their beliefs and convictions and now ...since 9/11...incredibly and devisively so.
Somewhere along the way shortly after the threat of the writers guild strikes what followed was the explosion of unscripted tv. The gladiatorial ultimate humiliation of anyone willing to participate. The advertising that has come to accompany it that I have seen (from my limited exposure to TV) has all the subtlety of a bludgeon to a forehead and is executed with a spirit of meanness and vitriol. TV (in the half hour segments I have been exposed to here and there) presents human beings as teeth-baring monkeys shrieking for dominance on this collossal dirt-heap commanding the viewer/consumer to do their bidding. Or else.
Did you know that 50- 55% of all broadcast news isn't really "news" at all? These are news-like pubic relations "informational" peices that are really either advertising or editorializing for their corporate investors. All of these pieces are assembled by former journalists who work for two major madison avenue PR firms that represent top Fortune 500 companies...as news. How often have you seen stories on new miracle drug breakthrough stories on the news?
I had this dream last night that was terrifying beyond comprehension, and I woke feeling that societal trends are moving the world in this direction. A sense of the apocalypse that grows out of Christian versus everyone else and turns into a free-for-all of destruction unabated on a global scale
In my dream the whole world had deteriorated from a groovy "everybody do your own thing" into planet-wide hostility reality-television style free-for-all. There were those who fought for the side of "good" and there were those who fought for power and control. One character in my dream described the situation like this "everybody knowingly or not, whichever side they're fighting for is fighting for the ultimate extinction of life on the planet. You can have a lot more fun with it if you know that's what you're really doing." This segued into an overhead view of hordes of people in the street in a crush type of mob, literally smearing the bodies of the people to the side against the sides of the building, and grinding them underfoot, into paste. There were warriors who devised weapons fashioned from the ridiculous...like toilet plunger man, who with his arsenal of toilet plungers would harpoon his victims killing them if speared and if they could instead catch them they would be showered with rose petals and urged to passionately kiss the nearest person in arms reach before getting killed by someone else right behind them.
Horrifying dreams, no?
I blame the so-called Christian Right for how bad things are in danger of becoming, and the complacent and lazy misinformed wrong-headed voter for voting on the basis of what they see on FOX News. Hell, half of my family falls in this category.
Wake me up...before we go, go.