Lapsed Modernist

I have this new favorite game while riding the subway in the morning: The Flash Headline (a variation on the Drive-by Doppler^*). I glance over at the Daily News or New York Post or that new freebie, AM New York and try to make sense of the headlines without attempting or even aspiring to read the articles themselves.

It's kind of like a reverse caption contest, where your brain has to visualize (comprehension is a Really Advanced level and proficiency is inversely related to Brains Not Eaten By Zombies) the confounding.

Like this morning, I looked over my right shoulder and saw:

YOU'RE OSAMA! CELEBRITIES' FACES TICKLE IN JUST THE RIGHT WAY

With some kind of pseudo-Biblical symmetry I looked over my left shoulder and beheld:

HALLIBURTON WINS BID TO REBUILD MIDWEST

[in its own image, presumably]

(complete with some low-rez vaguely "depressing" photograph that looks like a Kevin Costner experiment with "post-apocalyptic" photography in Iowa, natch)

This pretty much sums up my only sustainable m.o. of Media Ingestion. Or Media Indigestion (=Indignant Digestion). I know it's Bad For Me, but I like Playing With Fire. I mean, day in and day out I flash my gray matter, I am a total cocktease for the zombies. At the very least, I would have made a naughty, playful Persius, sneaking glanses at the Medusa that were barely in the mirror, like we're talking very low angles of incidence.

It's all fun and games, though, until like a Gowanus Canal Scuba Diver (Gowanus..." "the only body of water in the world...that is 90 percent guns." TM Jonathan "Hipster" Lethem), I have to submerge into the CNNasty.

Fuck you, CNN, because Miles O'Brien looks like Mel Gibson.

I think Mel Gibson should be the new anchor for CNN. I think that kind of lateral promotion would contribute to The Noumenon of CNN and Reality As It Is.

Anyway, so I am working as an archival person/post-production peon for this project and in the course of looking for Gulf War footage, I watched an old CNN special, from before Bush War II (totally cribbing the term from Conversation with Woody Harrelson and Howard Zinn). The tape was called:

CNN PRESENTS: 5 QUESTIONS

Narrated by Lupen Blitzkrieg, of course.

Homo homini wolf blitzer est.

so, the five key questions were:

1. SHOULD SADDAM BE ASSASINATED?
2. DOES SADDAM HAVE CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS AND, IF HE DOES, ARE THE US SOLDERS PREPARED?
3. WHAT IF IRAQ STRIKES ISRAEL...AND ISRAEL STRIKES BACK?
4. ARE THE SMART BOMBS REALLY SMARTER?
5. WHAT ABOUT YOUR WALLET?

I shit you not. This was the five-part breakdown.

if were were in a courtroom drama, a hatchet-faced honest attorney would say firmly: "objection, your honor, leading quesitons!" And the judge would Point-Counterpoint with: "and Wolf Blitzer shall dwell with the lamb and a child fetus shall lead them!"

So, like, actually what I learned is, the media doesn't just, like, do a by-the-numbers Orwellian switcheroo on the facts. Its evilocity lies in creating an entire simulacrum of a critical discourse, it is "doing" the American public like those guys "do" the deaf girl in "In the Company of Men." Look at the questions! They address "accountability," "global reprocussions," "ethix," "hyperbole in advertisement" and "the economy." You'd almost think they have a whole analysis of the sociopolitical phenomenon of the military-industrual complex in the post-Cold War milieu of late-stage capitalism! Except that instead of a cause-and-effect discourse you are served a heap of American's Favorite Game, "izzit or aintit?"--a game into which Americans are socialized daily through such playdates with the media as the Michael Jackson Trial and Abortion Vs Terri Schiavo Debate.

When I was little my friends and I liked to play "the knife game." There was no real name for it, it was just "the knife game." We would draw a circle in the ground with the knife and then take turns throwing it into the circle. You would draw a chord going through the point of impact at the angle that the knife entered the ground. That was "your" territory. After the initial split of the circle into two sections, you threw the knife into "enemy" territory, trying to literally "cut off" a large portion for yourself. The trick to the whole thing was, you had to stand on "your territory" while throwing the knife, so if your opponent was doing really well, you could have virtually no ground to stand on, literally. Then you lost.

Because on some level I AM a PSA for "Never Engage With Zombies!" and my brain HAS been compromised, that is what it generates when I send a request for "metaphor."

I went to see my advisor yesterday, and among other things we talked about NPR. He was lamenting the fact that NPR was being sliced and diced out of its remaining pathetic piece of land after being gradually eroded out of whatever "progressive" niche it used to occupy. and how tragic it was.

No way, I said. NPR is kinda like Pastor Niemöller. NPR kept quiet and now that they've come for NPR, there is no one left to speak up for it.

I am going to digitize my sentience and go live on this website. In case the Internet gets unplugged, do not consider me a communist.

^*That's when you judge a conversation based on the fragment that you overhear as the interlocutors pass by you. Sometimes this leads to weltschmertz and other times it leads to Overheard in New York