TV Makes You Dumb

I should make it a point to mention to anyone who reads this that I have permanently given up television. It has been a few weeks now and I wasn't sure how long I'd hold up, but let me tell you--I'm done with TV. In my philosophical thinking, I consider myself an idealist with individualist leanings, as you can probably tell--but do not think that I do not think practically. TV was costing me about forty bucks a month, and seeing how I am a poor individualist with a penchant for fine wine and cigarettes--amongst other things, I decided that the most logical action I should take would be to abandon the pleasures of my forty-dollar-a-month television. After all, the only TV station I watched was CSPAN, and one can watch it for free on the internet. Ocasionally I would watch Comedy Central or Cartoon Network, but there are far more interesting and entertaining things to watch on YouTube.

I wonder sometimes if I am alone in my abandonment of television. I find myself out of the loop in school. I've never watched the OC or whatever the new 20-something hit is, but at least I was in the loop on the commercials. The other day in my British literature class, my instructor, whom I highly respect, mentioned something about the previews for a new movie about Queen Elizabeth and I hadn't heard a word about it. Are there others like me who haven't heard of this movie? Everyone in class seemed to know about it. It bothered me for some reason. It seems the only useful purpose I could find in television was it's role it played in informing me of new motion pictures. I hate TV but love movies--weird, I know. There was a time when I was like most of America--intellectually drained by that sucking sound one can almost hear coming from the rectangular idol found in most living rooms across this great nation. I heard Norman Mailer give a speech in which he stated that he believes the reason for the high rate of ADD in the youth, and the overall apathy and ignorance prevalent in America, is due to commercials. Think about it--when you watch whatever it is you watch, you get about ten minutes of dialogue and narrative, and then you are interrupted by something totally irrelevant for five minutes. Your mind gets accustomed to this intake of information in fifteen minute intervals. He said when he was growing up, and even not too long ago, it was not unheard for someone to read two hundred pages of a book in a single sitting. There was no interruption in that intake of information. However, when parent's tell their children to do their homework today, the child may work for ten or fifteen minutes until he or she gets bored and then the parent has to yell at them for five minutes until they go back to the homework. At the time when I heard him say this, I thought it to be somewhat inconsequential, but later on I noticed that the only programs I watched on television were PBS and CSPAN, and what do you know--neither have commercial breaks.

The other reason for giving up on television is the fact that most news programs are designed to be watched by people with a sixth grade education. "Big words" are frowned upon. And besides that, what would be presented in the opinion section of a newspaper is presented to us as the news--objective facts have been sacrificed to the gods of...never mind--the word 'sacrifice' infers that the thing being sacrificed is worth something to the person doing the sacrificing. Bill O'Reilly, who is almost as repulsive to us Irish as Oliver Cromwell, is on primetime--enough said. Loony old Bill's books--and I use that term lightly only in the fact that they are bound pieces of paper-- have about as much thought and intelligence put into them as a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The only problem is that I was raised on Bugs Bunny and I hate to see the nation of fascists who are being raised on Bill O'Reilly. But loony old Bill doesn't write books for people to read. He knows as well as I do that people don't read his books, they just buy them to place them on the shelf next to the picture of his buddy dub-ya. The people who actually read his books (and I'm sure I can name all of them--dub-ya if he could read, that sick-fuck Bill Kristol, the Rockefeller clan, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Gary Bauer, the rapist of liberty Dick Cheney, and the two Eliot's--Cohen and Abrams) are the most disgusting and repulsive members of the human race to have ever existed. It defies me to think that the beauty of childbirth and womanhood could have created these sick individuals. I used to work at a fried chicken drive-in and they remind me of the vat that we used to dump the grease in. They are literally the scum of the earth.

Wasn't I talking about television, nevermind.

Mercenaries

What is the world coming to? A few weeks ago the we all found out about the incident involving some Iraqis killed by Blackwater contractors, and then came to find out that things like this have been taking place since the beginning of the war. Today, the AP reported that the Afghans are shutting down some security contractors there. And even the UN is stepping in and investigating concerns over contractor killings in Iraq.

There are serious moral ramifications when a country uses mercenaries to fight its war. Sure, we have troops on the ground, but it seems to me that what we are seeing is contractors being employed to do the dirty work.

Americans watch bombing campaigns on the television--bombing campaigns with names like Shock and Awe--and experience just that--Shock and Awe. Americans watching television have no idea in the world what it is like to be a first-hand whiteness to those bombing campaigns. We have never had bombs dropped on us here. We watch those scenes like they are clips from an action movie, but we never think about the janitor working the graveyard shift at Saddam's party headquarters. So we rationalize it and say to ourselves that its better to drop bombs than to send our boys to the field. And our rationality serve the monsters that create war well because they know that in order to achieve their goals, the civilian population of those places must become scared shitless. Now, several year later with troops on the ground, the population isn't as scared as the warmongers would like, but Americans would be outraged if their troops were caught indiscriminately killing civilians. The warmongers learned their lesson after My Lai. But to get around this unfortunate technicality, they hire mercenaries to do the indiscriminate killing today.

All war requires civilian mass murder, and whichever side can stomach it usually wins. The goal of the war-planners today is to keep the mass-murder off the front pages--to keep their civilian population inundated with football games and glorified karaoke singers--anything but the war. They cut taxes and tell Americans to go shopping. When we ask about the war they say, "Don't worry, let the experts handle it." After all, you do like driving your SUV don't you?

They hire mercenaries to do the indiscriminate killing. How convenient. Their twisted view of the free market involves privatizing all branches of the government that actually have a purpose, and creating bureaucracy where none is needed. The constitution explicitly states that it is the responsibility of the government to raise an army. They wish to privatize the army, and when this private, corporate army commits war crimes, they laugh when we explain it away as the evils of the free market. What the hell is that?

Free Sppech Zones

This is something I never really paid any attention to until today when I saw an interesting piece on a libertarian video blog about the free speech zones being erected around places where people are protesting. Basically, if you wish to protest anything about the current administration or even congress, you will be corralled into a cage often times far away from and out of sight of the people or proceedings being protested. This is a disgusting breech of the first amendment. The reason the first amendment was added to the Constitution was to make sure the government would not be deaf to the voice of the people. It is one of those sacred rights that has allowed us to live free of tyranny for so long. In times of increased threat of tyranny in our own nation we are in high need of the freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble. These rights have no power when they have been locked away in a concrete barrier far from view, as was the case at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. We must not be afraid of speech. Outlawed speech is what created our nation. Our founders knew that when the government becomes tyrannical, the people must have the tools to fight that tyranny. The freedom of speech and peaceful assembly are first, and the right to bear arms is second. When the power of words fail to defeat tyranny, the power of the sword is all that is left, and they have nearly taken that away from us. It seems this form of censorship has only increased under the current administration. We must not allow our rights to be trampled under the charging pachyderm of tyranny.