Paper Trail: Media and Culture
This essay concerns the numbing and conditioning of people’s minds till one can speak of a collective “mind of the masses.” It concerns the Global Citizen, Britney Spears and the current status of goddess rapture. We need only follow the paper trail of media culture… 
A handful of pages from a metro daily paper present a cross-section of our culture. Media masters cull and frame events to structure the reader’s mind with reactive feelings that suppress thought and the ability to think. Rousseau has won: the wind harp or Aeolian lyre as Romantics called it has become the model for a human being. One could say that the goal of the media-masters, beyond continuing on payroll, is to frame a page or folio of pages so that it becomes a mirror frame: when a subject beholds the mélange of images and words s/he sees his or her own mind that has been pre-fabbed via decades of immersion in mass media by which the media massage becomes the individual mind. The dirty pages of a tabloid are the pool of the modern Narcissus. Voila: “virtual reality” with use of the words “real” and “really” becoming more frequent in the vernacular in proportion to the rapidly rising virtual, abstract and etheric quality of our culture as the hierarchs emerge in menacing regional behemoths. Their institutions make our lives more two-dimensional and frail and their power more hard and intrusive every week.
But today the focus is on the microcosm…
I found an epitome of media mind-framing while recently rummaging through papers at a fitness center. For Global Citizens it’s all about Britney, but first the context: look at this two-page spread…
“Want to be cancer-free? Earn a college degree.” “Schoolboys busted for exposure.” “Bush speech to OK troop reduction.” “Pols: Infrastructure driven to brink”; “6 arrested in woman’s abduction, torture.” Even the alliteration blends to a cultural slurpy: the mind is a wet madras tee-shirt in a washing machine.
What was that about Bush being exposed? Which politician abducted that woman? The photos match the mush: an explosion, a soaking rain, and one other story – about restricting dogs from barking (not more than five minutes every twelve hours).
These are the hooks that grab, scramble and blur the mind from the second of the two major metro dailies in New England, the hub of the universe and “world of choice” as its PBS station proclaims. Salvador Dali would appreciate this recent spread on pages 4-5.
It probably is important that two K-5 boys were arrested for, as a young female classmate said, “showing their wee-wees” to her on the bus. The Boston Public School spokesman was quoted as saying “we don’t mess around” and that the offenders might “be kicked off the bus for a year.” Isn’t there a law against being judgmental? The neighboring column related that a city council in Florida had “boned up on noise ordinances” and put a gag order on dogs; owners may be fined.
There’s more: if kids like those on the bus get a College degree a Naitonal Cancer Institute report says they will be only half as likely to get cancer as those with but a high school diploma. What about the dogs? Why should they be excluded? They can’t bark, can’t go to College: it’s practically a death sentence. Fine the owners and universal college degrees on the house!
Raising revenue is the name of the game. When pols say, “bold fixes needed to curb crisis” (note the doggie reference) you grab your wallet and hide. Yes, “unpopular proposals [more tolls] “must be considered” and indeed the recently elected governor, Deval Patrick reportedly entertains “leasing the state’s bridge and roads to private companies,” perhaps from foreign firms. Global solutions to American sovereignty are provided for students by UNA-USA, “the United Nations Association of the United States of America part of the World Federation of UNA’s (WUFA).” WUFA seems a bit redundant but that’s part of its charm. It can bark all it wants, and bite. It publishes Global Citizen magazine which may discuss bridge and toll solutions as part of its “Economics of Globalization text [that] can be used as a full-length standards-based curriculum unit in high school classrooms” (una-usa.org).
“I pray you, remember the porter,” and UNA (see my previous essay at www.newswithviews.com) for we seem to be nearing “hell’s gate” (Macbeth 2.3.1-21).
Those in New England may remember that pink and rich “Republican,” William Weld won election by suggesting it was time to eliminate tolls on the Mass Pike. That was about sixteen years ago. The tolls have been rising ever since along with the careers of socialist-internationalist “Republicans” and the MBTA budget.
On cue, the Mass Bay Transit Authority says that it is $8 billion in debt. Not to worry: it’s only money. It can paper over almost anything.
Flanking the Farmer’s Almanac’s prediction of a warm winter were stories about troop reductions, torture and abduction. The layout is conceptually sharp and visually astute. Who’s framed dead center? Denim-clad everyman with a sheet of plastic over his head; some troops are going in, more are coming out but not like the “wee-wees” one hopes. Nancy Pelosi called the plan “an insult to the American people.” The champion of the poor says the President “has a tin ear.” She is “disappointed.” If only the writer had defined the term “American interests” we might understand why she claims to be miffed.
Gray papers swirl against the windshield as the car careens down the dead end street. Dogs bark.
Who are we? The denim-clad guy holding a plastic sheet over his head…
For what it’s worth, the fiercest public criticism of Iran in recent months has been coming out of Saudi papers in Arabia and in London (memri.org). Perhaps the current, extensive police action, no joke in casualties is again to protect the House of Saud, to suppress the flow of crude, hike prices and make life more poor, nasty and brutish.
The tabloid’s next two pages offered a spread on 9/11 memorial events: a monument to fire fighters was raised and survivors were profiled: sentiment heaved like a sea. UBL released an anniversary video exhorting jihad which, regardless of his provenance and intentions did not begin fifteen or thirty years ago but long before America and most of Europe coalesced. But these pages were mostly photos and a note that our “intelligence chief urges vigilance” which probably is a good idea.
But this is the era of triumphant relativism which means the powerful define the truth and everyone else is a parrot or a mute, or else. Note that “one wo/man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” And since Mrs. C has positioned herself as “strong on defense” one might wish a journalist would nail her down on her defintion of terrorism and what she will defend: pipe dreams; a framed mirror…
But enough beating around the bush back pages; let’s move up to the front row, page three which features plenty of color. We will ignore, at our peril, the large banner ad for Comcast products across the bottom fifth of the page and note the main story, two large headlines and larger photos of Britney, “I Britain” Spears that fill most of the rest. She’s not starving herself a la mode anymore and that was the story line.
PIG PILING ON! Read the largest headline above the lead article. This is public discourse for the proles, the masses in the New Feudalism whose socio-economic, politico-geopolitical facets since 1880 were preceded by a full century of neo-Gothicism in the arts and letters. Frankenstein remains the best known example and the ongoing appetite for dragons, elves, power-rings, goddess rapture and terror are the effluent attending the overt return of the high aristocracy and their tastes.
To discuss Britney’s weight (maybe this is the media’s definition of “American interests” as far as proles are concerned) the reporter trotted out a nutritionist, a psychiatrist, and the Dean of Communications at a prestigious University. A natural grouping, they all speak a polyglot psychobabble. Oddly, there were some sensible remarks, viz. “she’s not fat” and “the media’s always obsessed with the weight of celebrities.” Indeed: this is the machinery of distraction in mass media. Will they discuss Global Citizen? Not on camera, unless it is to confer vaporous platitudes.
The coyly named Britney is the latest British invasion to spear us, pinning us to the wall like poor Prufrock in Eliot’s poem. She has done, or been used to do everything vogue and vulgar: the media-driven fascination with her sexual status; her “nasty divorce and custody battle,” her problems with drugs, her shaved head, over-exposure and now the discussion of “eating disorders.” She’s the real teacher.
If one wants to degrade and distract people with sensate and maniacal trivia, this young human is the vehicle along with a stage like the MTV Music Video Awards. In the Post-Modern era, the ideology of mockery, artifice and exalted hodge-podge, every term needs quote marks around it: MTV passes for music and Britney, OJ, GWB, Sharpton and Imus are cultural icons. Sean is a “conservative”: Alan is a “liberal.” We have talking hairstyles, plausible persons, virtual reality and Newspeak everywhere.
The other page 3 story was about a young writer whose memoir of dysfunction, injury and homelessness is on the New York Times best seller list. Of course it is: if the State hasn’t arranged programs to do this to you yet, you’re deprived. The book is required reading to “inspire [students] to volunteer and help others,” a wonderful thing when it is voluntary. The State’s shadows lengthen; community service may soon be a prerequisite for employment… Who defines and enforces the service? What do the new group of world servers teach? Or do they simply “facilitate” toward group consensus?
Given the eternal (in our shrinking temporal frame of reference, history is out; ten years seems eternal) iconic status of Britney and her various types one might be sure that the Aquarian Age and old-time goddess worship were going strong: one can track it in institutions from academia, to law, media, sports and more. But a best-selling author begs to differ. “There has been a significant downplaying of the truly ancient traditions of the Goddess culture for all [our] supposed New Age Freedoms” sniffs Laurence Gardner, a Chevalier and proponent of the “Elder Faith…Earth Goddess and Ring Dancers” (Realm of the Ring Lords, 118-19, 158-9). He is not satisfied with the current feminist hegemony. If he has his way “the rich food of the matrix” and “lunar essence…of the original Star Fire” will and probably are being slurped in “the Shakti ritual of the Divine Mother” (ibid) wherever global citizens toe the mark, so to say. Such rituals are the “international education of a world society” (Julian Huxley, the Purpose of UNESCO, NY 1947).
And if Chevalier Gardner’s cult is not exactly what Huxley envisaged still the processes described elsewhere in this essay describe his plan “for the mass media…taking the techniques of persuasion, information and true propaganda that we learned to apply in war to overcome the resistance of millions” to world government (Huxley, op. cit).
Whence does it come, where does it go? This writer has sought to trace it in his most recent books. The antidote to the paper trail of distraction and goddess rapture destroying us from within is remembrance, thoughtfulness, kindness and marital love instead of mad excitements. It’s not too late; the new, hi tech Feudalism isn’t and won’t be nice.