Wednesday, September 11, 2002Thanks to jenett.radio for pointing to the following article--that of all the articles that I have read about the 9-11 anniversary, speaks to me and helps clarify my feelings.
From the Real to the Unreal.
My wife's yoga teacher ends each class with a saying that includes "from the Unreal to the Real", which I believe is a standard Hindu phrase. Watching and thinking about the anniversary of 9-11, I find we are going from the Real to the Unreal. The real is the actual event--the crash of the airplanes, the fall of the towers, so many dead. The ordinary Americans caught up in this tragedy responded in reality--with real pain, support, an outpouring of community and a collective grief. It was such a powerful event, unscripted, that the media ended up reflecting the emotion outward to the rest of the country. They did not create it.
With the year anniversary, we have gone from the real outpouring of grief to the unreality of scripted emotions with Peter Jennings and Aaron Brown. I almost never watch TV-- I would much rather read, talk, or write this blog--but sometimes when I am completely exhausted and wiped out, I will sit in front of the TV in a kind of hypnotic trance. Tonight, too tired to work, I sat in front of the TV for an hour to see what was being said about Sept. 11th.
What got to me was the emotion of it all. ABC interviewed various firemen who had been trapped, and then rescued, and used this as a template to replay the fall of the towers. These are really ordinary guys-- New Yorkers who look out for their brothers, who defend their jobs, who get caught up in the excitement of being there to fight the biggest high rise fire ever. The program reopened all the emotion-- but had no place to go with it. I am sick of looking at pictures of flags and the statue of liberty, and young children running and holding hands and looking up.
I felt I was being manipulated. We talk about totalitarian brainwashing, about how whole societies are purposefully programmed to feel the emotional tug of a leader like a Hitler, a Kim il Sung, or even a Slobodan Milosevic. The same thing is happening here -- not for a leader, but for the phantom of a leader. There is a nexus of collaboration between media companies feeding on our emotion and a political and business leadership who use a fog of emotion to breakup and confuse opposition. Thus comes the sense of going from the real to the unreal.
What happened last year was real. What is being replayed today is not. When you feel your society being manipulated on a grand scale, a first reaction is to opt out, to withdraw. But if you don't withdraw, you feel you are opposing an almost unbelievable power-- like a storm that you cannot possibly influence or control.
I don't feel strong enough to stop the militarization and loss of freedom in our society. But by clinging to the real-- to the small scale true relationships, by building trust with one person at a time, by making some changes at the margin, like electing a few more democrats, perhaps we can create some islands in the storm. Let's not go from the real to the unreal. Let's go from the unreal to the real.
[Toby's Political Diary - 'Let it Begin Here']
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:12:49 PM -
The Tuesday Morning Quarterback goes deep!
TMQ Would Meet Susan Sarandon at the Refrigerator Anytime: The 596-page September issue of InStyle, the magazine's annual "What's Sexy Now" cover, recently arrived at TMQ's home via crane. Just seeing the size of the issue was depressing enough. In magazine publishing, high page length means loads of advertising. A glam magazine with 596 pages! In contrast, the September and current weekly issues of The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Harper's and the New Yorker -- the four publications that are the last, shining hope of American thought and culture -- totaled 464 pages. InStyle bested all of them combined, despite the fact that its content is indistinguishable from advertising. Check that -- maybe because its content is indistinguishable from advertising.
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:17:52 PM -
