Skip to main content

The postman always rings thrice

My wife was reading an astonishing report from her FB feed the other day - "DNA Tests Prove Retired Postman Has Over 1,300 Illegimitate Children." Busy fellow and a true lover thought I, but in reality the story was all made up by a fake news web site. But this fake news story was spread around the world via social media shocking millions of people and I'll bet there is a huge percentage of those "Likers" that still don't know the story is false. A few days later, as an indictment of the GOP debate, Coy Barefoot posted three gems from Neil Postman on his FB feed.
  • “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
  • “[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter — [the problem is that] all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”
  • “I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed." 
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
 What a misanthropic joy-kill. This Postman wants "authentic information" but doesn't realize that TV News does aim to deprive it's audience of coherent, contextual understanding or, putting it more accurately, TV News tries to deliver a specific context to it's audience regardless of its coherence. Entertaining subject matter is a given - it always has been - unless you want info delivered in a 1984 monotone listing of facts and figures blasted over the ubiquitous loud speakers for all to hear double-plus good. Culture-death? It's a fundamental fact of human existence and no more prevalent today than it was 100 or 1000 years ago. Postman's solution for our existential crisis can be found on his wiki page.
While positing his theory, Postman offers no solution for society on the whole. Even as he wrote in times before the widespread availability of the Internet, he acknowledged that there is probably no turning back from our visual, electronic age. Thus, he writes, "Resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture" 
If you search around the internet you will find these rebellious parents and their offspring, but I'm not sure it bodes well for Americas cultural future.

7 children from 1 Sperm Donor (father)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson

She was "sexy", but "too much hard work." I'm a regular Fox & Friends viewer (mostly in protest of the other insipid morning programs like Today and Good Morning America) so over the years I've gotten to know Gretchen Carlson pretty well. Stuck between Steve and Brian she always seemed a prudish scold with an irritating, self-righteous demeanor that I simply put up with because I figured some people in the Fox audience actually liked her persona. It was obvious that Steve and Brian did not, but they were stuck with her like so many talking heads and had to make the best of it - which they did. Besides, she was no worse than any of the other women on morning show TV - I mean, you're only going to find a certain kind of person to do this kind of work and that kind of person is the Gretchen Carlson kind. Then, one day, she was gone and replaced by Elisabeth Hasselbeck and the F&F ratings began to climb, and climb and climb - in two months view...
1 comment
Read more

The Pop-Tarts Bowl: Frauds v. Fakers

In the Techno-Fascist Imperium the "Holidays" festivities start on Columbus Day, when the Halloween candy pops up, and end New Years Day with college football Bowl games, black-eyed peas and collard greens. To be clear, the Imperium doesn't celebrate Columbus Day, au contraire, the Indigenous Peoples' Day psyop has been pushed hard by the IC for the past 50 years of failure but the candy... THE CANDY. This year's IPD got turned up to eleven when the colonizers of America's 51st state got kidnapped, raped and murdered by some indigenous maniacs on Sukkot 10/7 and, as a result, soured the festive '23 Holiday mood. Hey, we soldiered on, as it were, and kept on celebrating while the world burned: Halloween - Big for children and weirdos. Thanksgiving - Focus on God, country and family. Hannukkah - Jewish assimilation. Xmas - Santa Claus and gifts. Kwanzaa - Black Lives Matter. I'd call them Happy Holidays if it wasn't  a neo-Nazi dog whistle  to vocal...
Post a Comment
Read more

Obligatory Report On The Techno-Fascist Imperium

John Henry Durham (great name) dropped his " REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL   CAMPAIGNS " and, as the Keeper Of The Clown Bell, I feel compelled to write down my thoughts on this subject which has been the catalyst for so much bell ringing over the past eight (8!) years. I'm going to start with some hard truths, as I see them, and then move into speculative puzzling I've noodled over these long years of Cold Civil War. So don't stop reading even if the bumpy start makes you angry or despondent and be sure to click on the links which serve as footnotes or references for my report. I'm going to start on election night November 8, 2016 and reference a video recording of Government TV's coverage of the big event. The PBS NewsHour panel was populated by establishment left-wing talking heads and GOP squishes preparing to coronate Her as First Woman POTUS and for the first 4 hours of th...
Post a Comment
Read more