Mornin' All....

[medicine]

The ever resourceful Brenda has sent me here, I think to save her own sanity and stop all her hair falling out. Anyhow, whatever her reasons, here I am. I now have my very own ' box in the corner' which I will stand in whenever I feel a rant coming on

Comments

Roy on Chomsky

[anonymous]

The wonderful Arundhati Roy has written a piece that probably won't fit here, but I'll post a snippet or two and the link to the full thing. I first came across her when in one of my prolific reading periods, I read her novel set in a pickle factory, 'The God of Small Things' which I believe later won a Booker or a Turner or whatever.. anyhow it's a wonderful novel. Little did we know that we were tuning into the mind of the political activist she's since become.
The loneliness of Noam Chomsky
by Arundhati Roy

September 01, 2003

I will never apologise for the United States of America - Idon't care what the facts are."
President George Bush Sr.

[LJ made me snip it some more]

In the "free" market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else - - justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It's available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how
they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky's political writing.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. "The prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial Times.
What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other democracies - the United States in particular - media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.'s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and
Enron's infiltration of U.S. government institutions and the mass media -all this is public knowledge now.)

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the U.S.government's mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest
of the world.

Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem
as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. But of course that never happened. The myths live on.

There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully
comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a
controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen.

Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the
mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.
{big snip]

more....
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4116