Fuel For The Fire

Hotbeds of discontent are virtually everywhere around the planet. Faraway, well heeled interests are demanding that the average man sacrifice even more for their ballooning riches. As greater and greater wealth concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, the rich, rather than appreciating where their dollars come from, demand an even greater say in government, use new tools to enhance the types and tools available to wrest subsidy from the rest of us, and more and more frequently design enabling legislation that rewards them for their exploitation of the masses. The ultra-wealthy actually believe that they are wealthy because they are good, that they deserve lop-sided rewards and have faith that as job creators, their endeavors are more important than the undertakings that the rest of us engage in. Populations everywhere on Earth have had their resources polluted, poisoned and robbed by global interests for generations. This is not new. What is new is that there are fewer and fewer voices calling the empire builders to task for their transgressions, fewer and fewer teeth in laws that protect the planet and fewer and fewer ways for the truth to get out to a worldwide audience.

I do have the luxury of speaking to thousands of people from my living room, but the five largest media conglomerates share access to the thousands of newspapers, television news stations and basically guide the public debate, defining terms and making stuff up as it suits them. In television production, we only get to edit down what the cameras have been pointed at. The images we pull from the raw "stock" are a tiny fraction of those images and what makes it to the nightly news is just a wisp of what actually went on.  This is the smoke, repeating the ideas that these images call up is a nearly infinite number of mirrors. As a cameraman, one realizes that they have huge blinders on, as an editor, you try to piece together a semblance of "reality". Like carrying water in a sieve, the technology of television is far more like painting watercolors with a broom than telling the truth.

This week, I became aware of Honey booboo, a popular cable show that had higher ratings than the first Presidential debate.  It is about a young child and her mother, on the pageant circuit, that someone had the idea of following around with a film crew, editing down their lives to provide "entertainment" for the masses. I saw about thirty seconds of the edited version and was both repulsed and confused that they would qualify as worthy of even pointing a camera at. Yesterday, I heard that this little child has become such an icon that she has the power to introduce new words to the language. specifically, "Redneconize". This is used as a substitute for recognize, but investigating further, I was astonished that it is more about reckoning than cognition. In dead reckoning, we use only what is observed to orient ourselves. Cognition requires using more than what meets the eye to make up our minds. In nautical navigation, or aviation, dead reckoning can be used to some extent, but as any of us who have tried to boat or fly without good maps, charts, or navigational aids know, taking everything we "see" at face value is the best way to get in trouble. Without a deeper understanding of the world around us, we court death.