I know they are coming for my stuff. I read the Telegraph.
Aboriginal, gay, unemployed single mothers stalk our streets. Refugees flood our beaches. Transgender porn fills libraries and small businessmen weep in the street while being beaten by communist Union Officials. All while Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian and assorted other hordes are all poised. Plus, Aboriginals want my suburban block.
But even so. We have the media we deserve. It has been created to sell us what we want. To pander to our particularly vacuous modern brand of fear and loathing.
In 2018, Steve Bannon observed that: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
But this seemingly pithy observation serves to distract from the actually tragic reality. Namely, it is impossible to flood the zone with shit. It is already flooded with shit. Well before there was a right-wing media the modern broadcasting landscape was already a barren wasteland studded with noxious cesspits. Yes, in one far corner there is a rarely accessed little door that is labelled ‘The real world and rational commentary’. But nobody is interested.
So, while we attack ‘the media’. The reality is that we already have precisely the media that we want. Our media is full of very sick and perverted ideas and people because our society is full of sick and perverted people. We only like to pretend we are ‘nice’. (Get over it.)
As a baby boomer, like all my peers, I respond instantly to fear and loathing. Our generation was going to change the world. We would forsake the military industrial complex that had enslaved earlier, less enlightened generations. We would tear down hypocrisy, religion, and bigotry.
Yet while the dream lasted just a fleeting childhood, it has haunted us all ever since. We cultivated a phantasm of hip skepticism and now all we have left is disenchantment and disbelief.
The new millennium has thus been especially difficult for boomers. We had corporately pledged to live fast and die young and pure – until we inherited. Then we caged the chickens and set aside actively believing or not-believing. It was complicated. After all, why go to all the bother of believing in things when you have cable? It is much easier to occupy a shallow and fleeting attention-span with porn, action movies, and lectures on the need to be terribly, terribly afraid.
So – we are the media. Every caricature you see selling hate and DazzTM on the tele is just a pale reflection of someone living on your street. Television is full of horribly ill-informed and shallow creeps simply because society is full of horribly ill-informed and shallow creeps. There are few deep thinkers simply because we don’t spend time thinking. We are not a population of thinkers. We collectively crave for distraction and entertainment; not information.
We like to think that we are good scholarly people, who like to watch and listen to ‘good’ media, but we are not. In fact, we are a bunch of morally and intellectually corrupt creeps – and so our media is jam-packed with morally and intellectually corrupt creeps. But they are photogenic and charismatic creeps.
Yes, right-wing media channels are fashioning output carefully tailored to a receptive audience. But so are the rest. So, if ‘the media’ is atrocious, it is because we – collectively – are atrocious. Moreover, if we want to continue with an actually democratic system, where everyone has both a media and a voice, then we will always have a media that is chaotic, partisan, and flooded with ‘shit’. Until we become some entirely other sort of animal that is not snarky, horrible, ill-informed and intellectually corrupt. In other words: something entirely non-human.
Until then: Viva la chaos.
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