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Queen for a Day

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

“Notice how he gets them nodding…”

You may remember a remarkable daytime TV show from the 1950s. It was called “Queen for a Day,” a spectacle featuring cheap sentiment and teary confession to elicit sympathy expressed by applause measured on a meter like one you’d use to test a battery. Stimulus and response were straightforward, befitting a time simpler than today: the more sorrowful a woman’s tale of woe the more those in studio would clap. The level of applause implied audience approval, the group’s feeling that the woman and her family needed help more than others; the more applause, the higher the ‘applause-o-meter’ registered. It was a “solidarity day service” via the electric coliseum… (more…)

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Heavy Weather

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

“Incompetent attempts to commit suicide…are indecent and distressing acts that can easily become a serious social nuisance, from which the normal citizen is entitled to be protected.” [1]

The English give themselves away, with phrases like “indecent and distressing acts” and “serious social nuisance”: look, mate, if you’re going to pipe off, be a sport and do it quietly, eh; don’t be indecent old boy.” Then they gave us “the Animals,” Britney, etc. (more…)

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First, a confession: In my previous essay I made a mistake; I wrote that the Red Sox used pink bats, wore pink wrist bands, pink satin bows on their jerseys and that the MLB logo and bases had pink decals, etc. I forgot to mention that they also wore pink plastic necklaces with large, clunky pink beads, — actually, both teams did. If you don’t like the pinking of baseball, pod people scream that you don’t care about breast cancer or motherhood.
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Convergence: Pink & Puglubbuh…

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end there won’t even be any need for reality control.” [1]

“There was a growing coarseness of articulation… [a] jabber multiplied in volume but less and less comprehensible. Imagine language, once clear-cut and exact losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again.” [2]

My prediction last summer was a bit off: the Red Sox did not wear pink uniforms for their Mother’s Day game this May (nor did they win: this time their 9^th inning rally fell short). But their bats were toned far more deeply pink as if dyed in liquid lipstick. They wore pink wristbands, pink satin ribbons in a bow on their chests. There were pink decals on the bases and a pink “MLB” (Major League Baseball) logo by each foul line. “Wait till next year…”
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Gaffes, Gas & Garbage

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

The title refers to the horse race for the white house and its interpretation and labeling by the court jesters of the major media. It is a pre-scripted, outcome-based black comedy which numbs minds “habituated to accepting unreality as reality” while the bodies attached to these minds are prepped for poverty and recycling per environmental dogma.

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Death Magic

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

The mass media continue discovering ways to distract the public from the core issues America faces. I use the neutral term “public” rather than “citizens” though we are citizens still, partly. What else could we be, subjects? Well, bad laws, capricious, post-modern application of laws, and, for decades Television has been directed toward reducing reason and, thus a sense of justice, of right and wrong; reducing too the ability to think or act with the result that most of us, to varying degrees, have been reduced to a glop one might term, “the masses.” Experimental psychology and the entire Pavlovian project, from advertising and ‘news’ to the classroom intertwine with this development but that’s another essay.

To television we can add computers and the various screen-experiences they provide from blogs to “games,” the worlds of X-Box and Play station. This is the world of see, push, point and click, of sense-and-respond, an animal world; or perhaps it’s a war zone in which emotions and hormones go wild. Do more people use the internet to study, learn history and write analytically or to “surf” for imagery, for various kinds of pornography, including simple voyeurism, if this kind of morbidity is ever “simple.” (more…)

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War and Culture

Archive for the ‘articles’ Category

Queen for a Day

Heavy Weather

The Oldest Profession

Convergence: Pink & Puglubbuh…

Gaffes, Gas & Garbage

Death Magic

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