By William Bowles
January 3, 2012
2011 has been nothing if not eventful but frankly,
in spite of all the #Occupy this and #Occupy that, it's not been a good year
for us progresssives or the planet. The Empire acts with increasing, not
decreasing impunity, desperate now to try and keep ahead of events lest events
take control of it.
Are we living in a fool's
paradise?
A question keeps nagging at me: Are
all of us, including the left, reacting to an entirely engineered reality, fed
to us via an all-embracing media? We get blown this way and that, all of it
being determined by whatever 'event' the globalized media decides to feed us
with. Then, just as 'mysteriously', the 'event' disappears to be replaced by
yet another 'event'.
The old Anarchist cry of 'Do not
adjust your mind, there's a fault in reality' takes on an entirely new kind of
import given the power of the media to determine what's 'real' for us.
What this means is that the media
effectively acts as an agent provocateur for
the state and big business as it decides for us what is actually going on in
the world. In turn, progressives make decisions based not on what needs to be
done, but as a reaction to the 'news' in a weird political version of the Heisenberg
Effect.
Press coverage of the Summer Riots is
a perfect example of this process in action whereby the media, by focusing
solely on the violence and destruction, not only transformed it into a 'riot
without a cause' but in doing so actually incited even more violence and
destruction, just as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are worn as 'badges
of honour' by alienated youth who actually go out of their way to get one (or
two).
Aside from anything else it
demonstrates just how out-of-touch the political elite is with the reality of
life as it is really lived by a goodly chunk of the population; the so-called
underclass.
Life as supplied to us is now an
endless succession of 'crises' or public spectacles (the lines between the two
often blur):
'Ground-to-air missiles 'may protect' London 2012
games' ~ BBC News, 14 November 2011.
In fact, the very nature of BBC's
headlines betray the essence of how to report the 'news' as a succession of
dramas to be played out, not in the real world that you and I live in but in
the world created by a globalized, corporate media machine.
'Crises' are played out in the TV
equivalent of 'flaming' (shooting off at the mouth without thinking). Dictators
come and go... All but the dramatic essence is removed and along with it real
meaning disappears. This is the triumph of television, the ability to be able
to cut and paste reality in its entirety.
And the question, what of life
outside the media-supplied 'reality' has been brought home to me by MSM's
coverage of the #Occupy 'movement'. The left debates its relevance and its
potential endlessly but within the confines of a media-supplied reality. All
that's solid melts into air, or in this case bits and bytes.
The #Occupy movement exists for as
long as it grabs the headlines and for said headlines to work, an element of
violence is an absolutely necessary ingredient for it to become 'news'. But
once the 'confrontations' are gone and the 'struggle' safely removed to the
controllable environment of the High Court, the story is no longer 'newsworthy'
except as a footnote to '2011 - Year of Occupations'.
We are now literally, passive
observers of our own funerals in a world of total media saturation and control.
A world of endless tragedy but at a distance, mediated by an unseen hand and
fed to us pretty much like an out-of-control soap opera, where events break and
at first reporting is chaotic and normally wrong but as soon as the MSM has
gotten hold of the 'right script' then 'reasons', 'causes' and 'solutions' can
then be inserted for each unfolding, dramatic episode.
Gaddafi's tortured, broken and abused
body presented to us as the rightful end to a 'weirdo celebrity', a victim of
his own success and failure. First courted then betrayed, an epic worthy of a
plot by Shakespeare.
The 'story' can then be handled as spectacle and for as long as it remains
spectacle it's a
product that can be safely and passively
consumed. In this sense the #Occupy movement has also become a victim of its
own success. It plays out its life not in the real world but in that other
reality, that the rest of us live
in, the one supplied by the corporate media machine.
In turn this determines our
relationship with it or lack of one. The media for example talks of how
occupations or strikes affect the public, as if by some miraculous process, the
occupiers or strikers are no longer part of the 'public'. They've been
relocated to media-land to live lives as ephemeral as the photons they are made
of.
It's for this reason that the
question of the role of class in the proceedings rarely if ever figures in
media-land, for if it were to explore the role of class with as much zeal as it
explores the 'role' of violence, it would have to redefine its use of the word
'public' let alone violence. It would also have to reveal which side of the
class divide it's actually on.
If it's true, and I think it is, that
it's working people who are paying the price for the crimes of the 1%, the ones
who own the capital that (just about) makes capitalism work, then it's a
question of a struggle between two classes; those who own capital and those who
don't.
Currently the media represents the
interests of the 1% of the 'public' that imposes its reality on the proceedings as if it's ours. A reality
in which certain fundamentals are a 'given', for example, the rule of private
capital, the primacy of the state to act with impunity in all things in order
to 'protect our national interest'. In a phrase, the preservation of the
existing order and way of doing things.
Even the tools that we now have including blogs, social
networking and instantaneous video have proved to be very powerful tools of
propaganda for the Empire. Tools that have been turned against us as is the
case with Libya and now Syria.
The BBC's use of video from
cellphones ~ mostly unattributed and revealing nothing about what is actually
going on in Syria ~ have become the staple diet of the BBC's alleged news
coverage of Syria, claiming that they're not allowed into the country.
And 'bloggers' are now a regular
feature of MSM coverage, which is fine except that only a couple of years ago,
the MSM was ranting on about how 'blogging' was going to be the death of
'professional' journalism. If only...
But no more, the MSM realized that
'reality' video was the perfect tool of propaganda, as it appears that it's 'the people'
speaking. The BBC is merely relaying
'reality' to its public and in the process it accrues the authenticity needed to make it
believable. To make it credible.
And in doing so, the MSM has
jettisoned the last remnants of what it chooses to call 'impartial and
objective' journalism.
The drama and (hidden) tragedy of the
destruction of Libya was played out for us as if it were cinema verite all grainy footage and hand-held cameras swinging about wildly
all over the place, inter-cut with BBC propagandists masquerading as news men
standing in front of a weapon of death boasting to the viewer of its awesome fire power.
As the Empire acts with increasing
impunity,
so too does the media.
The Media and the Empire in total lockstep
This cartoon map reflects the new global reach of the United States by the end of 1898. For comparison, the inset shows the territorial extent of the U.S. 100 years earlier, in 1798, before the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, and the other actions that led to the nation’s territorial growth.
The U.S. acquired former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico (called Porto Rico in this cartoon ~ both spellings were used) and the Philippines (marked here by the name of the city of Manila) as a result of the Spanish-American War.The Ladrones Islands, which had been under Spanish rule, included the island of Guam.What major Caribbean island not pictured here went from being a Spanish colony to being under the U.S. “sphere of influence”?Hawaii had a different story. American sugar planters in Hawaii had deposed the islands’ Queen Liliuokalani five years earlier, but the U.S. did not officially annex Hawaii until 1898. ~ Herodotus
This disease of colonialism and imperialism has only become ever so much worse.
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