...07/25/99...............
ok, time to face the fact that i'm a crank at heart. a wannabe ranter. a closet raver, crackpot, and would-be screamer at pigeons. an obsessive complainer grown tired of constantly having to keep my head above all the anger and the bitterness.
time to let go of the flotsam and jetsam of etiquette and politeness and allow my hopes and self-respect to sweetly drown....
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i live in a sick society. i was reminded of that again last night when i flipped on the 11'oclock news 6-8 minutes early. i instantly saw a man about to be hanged. lynched, i guess. there was a mob, a tree... except a bunch of guys showed up at the last second and rescued the guy, then beat the crap out of his would-be executioners. i think it was on cbs. whatever it was on, it sickened me, though i saw less than 15 seconds of the damn thing.
all i had done was push a button....
instead of pushing the button again as i should have, i tried changing the channel. i got a promo for the next star trek voyager episode. star ships were exploding right and left. shields were failing on the main ship.
thank you, jesus.
i stupidly changed channels again instead of turning the machine off and got a promo for a wwf grudge match.
in less than 60 seconds, tops, i'd been exposed to more violence than i have seen firsthand in my entire real life.
just what the fuck kind of culture am i trapped in????????
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"hannibal" is the #1 bestseller in the country. it's the story of a murderous people-eater. newsweek tells me that "The scenes of cannibalism and torture are so overwrought - so gruesomely medieval - that they seem almost comic."
haha.
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when asked about the gore hollywood pumps out, producers and others involved often say that we live in a violent world and movies only reflect that reality. well, it doesn't reflect MY reality or what i want that reality to be, and i really doubt that it reflects anyone's reality very accurately.
consider this:
"But if the MPAA is puritanically intolerant of sex, it also has
peculiar notions of 'acceptable' violence. A director who
frequently tangled with the ratings board told me an instructive
story. He did some research on fistfights and discovered that a lot
of them last one punch: In real life, one person's nose gets broken
and the other person's hand gets broken. There's a lot of blood. I
once watched a friend get his nose broken in a (brief) fistfight
and it remains one of the most ghastly things I've ever seen. Now,
let's pretend I want to film such a fight for the purposes of
making violence realistically horrible--so that anyone who sees it
will think twice about getting into a fight. I put in the sound of
cartilage being crunched and show the bright red blood pouring out
of someone's nose, and I give you a close up of the other person's
broken fingers beginning to swell. Agony, right? And very
likely--if I do my job correctly--an NC-17. Too explicit for
children. Now let's pretend I decide to restage that fight and make
it painless--ten punches back and forth, Popeye-style, with no
blood and both guys walking away unblemished. That's a G, folks.
The lesson for kids is that violence is funny and bloodless and
without real consequences." - David Edelstein, Slatebut let's suppose hollywood violence is, in fact, a perfect reflection of someone's reality. why is hollywood so hot to reflect this aspect of life accurately when it so totally distorts everything else? we don't live lives with appropriate background music. we don't have access to beaches where everyone is beautiful. we don't have an LA or a Dallas where it never rains. we aren't half as witty as the youngest smartass on the worst tv sitcom. we don't live stories that can be resolved in 30 seconds or 30 minutes or 2 hours or 13 episodes. there's far more crime on tv and far fewer ugly and old people than in real life.
HELLO???
hollywood is fiction. it is escapist fiction.
why are we, as a society, choosing to escape into violence and gore?
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in recent years steven spielberg has won numerous awards and much praise for his adroit depiction of violence.
i am not impressed.
his work reminds me of that of the meese commission on pornography in the '80s or the old paintings which lovingly depict the tortures of hell and the debaucheries which were believed to send people there. nothing like a bit of righteous indignation to provide cover for what would otherwise obviously be obscene wallowing....
did we really need to see "schindler's list" in order to know that it's bad to shove people into ovens?
did we really need to watch "saving private ryan" to know that war is a bloody mess?
how reassuring to be able to blame everything on the nazis in both cases.
how special that exquisite recreations of The Holocaust and omaha beach hide the greater realities of other, lesser-known holocausts, of other, less bloody (and even non-american) d-day beaches - and the fact that wwii was decided on the rarely-recreated eastern front....
how special that buying a ticket to see a gross recreation of evil is made to seem like a moral obligation....
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one of the most startling things i've ever experienced, i experienced alone with a red towel.
take a red towel. the brighter, the better. spread it out in good light. stare at it upclose for a minute with one eye closed. then close the eye you looked with and look at the towel with the other.
alternate eyes.
notice anything unusual?
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one of the most interesting experiments i ever read about involved a frog and a pot of water.
heat the water to a boil. drop in the frog. the frog hops out. end of story.
start over with cold water. put the frog in. heat slowly to a boil. the frog stays and cooks to death. end of frog and story.
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start collecting teddy bears. stuffed ones. ceramic ones. calendars. join the smokey the bear fan club. watch yogi bear on tv. go to the zoo every week and watch the bears for an hour. watch nature specials on polar bears. clip news stories about the panda bears. play "feed the bear" videogames.
when a man smacks you in a bar and yells "think of an animal, dammit!"
what animal do you think of without really thinking at all?**************************************************************************
**************************************************************************and while i'm on the subject of our sick society....
i swore i wasn't going to mention this again. i really did. but it's a splinter in my mind and i have to keep fingering it until i get it out or the annoyance goes away.
in any other entry, i'd be sorry.....
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my paper ran another front page kennedy story today:
"jfk, jr.'s death puts cousins in spotlight" - total: 35 column inches
on the front page of section b, it ran another:
"caroline kennedy pursues a quiet life" - total: 40 column inches
that story was continued on page 3 where a third kennedy story awaited me:
"ted's shoulders become broader as kennedy patriarch" - total: 24 column inches
forward to section f - another story:
"rory leads a low-key life for a kennedy" - total: 40 column inches
grand sum total of all 4 stories: 139 inches, or 11.5+ feet of kennedy infotainment
it's like something out of beckett, kafka, or ionesco.....
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new rule of thumb: if a person's death leads to far, far more coverage of them than their life ever did, something's wrong....
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CORRECTION: in yesterday's entry i said that my paper failed to mention the 14 iraqi civilians apparently killed by u.s. bombs a week ago today. i was WRONG. my paper gave the story 3" on page 2 last monday. i just lost sight of it among the 280" given over to jfk, jr. ....
i regret the error.
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i got an email after my first entry on jfk jr. i thought it was gonna be my first hate email ever, but it wasn't. it was from someone who agreed with me.
unexpected, and even somewhat scary. unusual things often are.
they even said "you said it all."
alas, i did not.
a columnist - in my paper, of all places - added a little something i'd overlooked. basically, that the disproportionate coverage being given jfk jr.'s death was partly a function of the news media knowing him personally.
*light bulb*
maria kennedy shriver is a reporter for cbs.
i'd just read how diane sawyer was absent from the coverage because she was too busy comforting the kennedy family to work for abc.
i've also now read that CNN's Christiane Amanpour covered the story even though she once roomed with jfk jr.
excuse me??
is it good journalism to let people connected with the story to cover it???
*sigh*
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yes, there's more.
i happen to own a collection of news magazines.
SURPRISE!
and guess what?
when jfk was assassinated in 1963, newsweek gave the story 2o pages in a 108-page issue
the new issue gives jfk jr 29 pages out of 78 total.....
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footnote: the assassination of martin luther king, jr. in 1968 did NOT make Time's cover.
the marriage of jackie kennedy to aristotle onassis the same year did make the cover
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**************************************************************************"not that it matters, but much of what follows is true" - william goldman, preface to his script "butch cassidy and the sundance kid"
"oh, but it does matter, mr. goldman! because when we inflate others out of all proportion to the truth, we diminish ourselves" - the authors of "in search of the real butch cassidy" [paraphrase]
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oddly enough, i watched the movie "lenny" a few weeks ago and it makes the same point.
a 1974 bob fosse film starring dustin hoffman in an oscar-nominated performance. even though it was filmed (unlike real life) in black and white.
it's the story of comedian lenny bruce.
as part of his act after the jfk assassination, lenny went up on stage with life magazine. he displayed the published photos of the zapruder film in which jackie is climbing out onto the trunk of the limo. he read the caption: "jackie shown going for help"
"going for help"
mr. bruce begged to differ.
"she was trying to save her own ass, man. you hear bullets whizzing by you, you see your husband's head blown off, you don't think 'i better go for help.' life magazine is lying, man. and so when some woman in detroit or new york or philadelphia hears bullets whizzing by her and she runs to save her ass instead of 'going for help' she's made to feel like a bad person because she didn't act as nobly as the great jackie kennedy...."
well. i'm not sure mr. bruce could get into jackie's mind any better than the caption writers at life magazine. but this admittedly paraphrased version of his version is at least plausible, and since i don't think jackie ever talked about that moment to a reporter, i suppose life magazine was, in effect, lying even if they accidentally got it right.
and we now know that the white house and the media were lying when they told us how witty reagan was after he was shot in 1981. "honey, i forgot to duck".... "doctor, are you a republican?" .... fabrications.... admitted to in books written years later by the people who did the fabricating....
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"when we inflate others, we diminish ourselves"
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misemphasis.
i sometimes think the root of all evil is misemphasis.
misemphasis of certain people. either because they're of our time, or country, or family, or color, or gender; or because they're rich or beautiful; or simply ourselves.
misemphasis of certain facts. either because they're easier to get, or more telegenic, or more comforting.
misemphasis of certain human practices, weaknesses, and ills. because... because we're an insane species consumed by Weltschmerz and schadenfreude?
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but to say any more would risk misemphasizing the importance i place on my own words.....
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*************************************************************************(not a letter of this rant © 1999 by dan birtcher)
