Bob Dylan said it a long time ago in a song, that "Not much these days is really sacred". To the extent that that article in red is about the loss of the sacred I agree with it. Some times people sound like they are disagreeing with you when deep down they are trying to say the same thing. What I mean by loss of the sacred is what Tom Hartman was talking about on his radio program today. He said that basically everything is up for sale and everything today is valued as if it were a comodity, and the sacred is sold as if it were just another comodity, perhaps to sell something else. But the movie Network was prophetic in this sense when he said, "We on the TV are the illusion, you are the people who are real" and "everything the media says is Bullshit". Howard himself became a comodity who in the end was more valuable dead than alive, because his death was a hell of a ratings booster of his news show. We regard everything as entertainment. We violate perople's personal feelings invading their lives at vulnerable moments all for the sake of ratings. I don't know how we "get back the sense of the sacred". It's a process that's been going on the past fifty years. Even back in 1961 there were people who said that television was a vast waste land. Since everything is done for ratings, intellectual content goes out the window. This is why people like Thom Hartman and Randi Rhodes are so unique. Because there is none of the yelling and screaming that occurs on most shows with high ratings. People want to be told how to think. Indeed the search engine Bing brags that it's an engine that "Makes the decisions for you". I haven't really weighed on with the whole subject of "mega-churches". But let me quote a favorite saying of mine that came from Dr. Phil McGraw. He said "You don't miss the church; you miss what you with it were. People have these fantasies of "The little country church" or "The little house on the prarie" but even these are comodity images bought and sold to the highest bidder. Are chickens clucking in a barn yard a romantic notion, but somehow a giggantic slaughter house is not? I guess if you look at it that way then the mega-church is the slaughter house, "getting the same thing done more efficiently". We have less and less an idea all the time what reality ever is now with topics like witchcraft and psychic visions and ghosts no longer considered as taboo. These are just more "media conventions" along with the fist fight where one guy beats up six or seven guys bigger than he is- - or the dramatic witness in court who in the last scene spills his guts and confesses everything. Thom Hartman has stated that we are a Fasciest state, much as "communist" China is a fasciest state. The destinctions between the two states is becomming less and less but now the sensorship is not because of sex or violence, but more often "Whether or not one TV program reveals more of the Truth than the government considers healthy- - - to itself. Hartman has cited numerous examples where people with acute analytical minds are routinely not allowed on news shows. Even Jello Biafra has talked about the "dumbing down" of America. In the old Fascism the state was supreme over all. But today, as Howard Beale said thirty years ago- - it's ratings that are King. Whatever is marketable and sells is good, no matter how bad for society it might be. And who today has the "ear of the President?" The big corporations dictated to the Bush - Obama administration (note the use of the singular) to tell it just how to deal with this recession. We are all so brainwashed we think that raising taxes on millionaires will somehow affect us, somehow. We are sold the illusion that we too can win the Lottery and "Have it all". In California they let a minority, the Republicans, dictate the terms of the budget legeslation that will prove acceptable that "all taxes are bad" and "all taxes steal jobs" and in general that personal greed is a good thing.
Let's talk about the President's health care plan. The Republicans are calling it "social experimentation" and that it will legalize euthanasia, and that old people won't get needed medical care, and that everybody will be forced to yield to a system of "government imposed medical rationing". Now the cry is that if somehow the Republicans can defeat this bill that they will break the hold the Obama administration has over the people. There are trying to run the same old "script" that they used once in 1993 and 1994. Because back then Hillary's medical health care package was defeated and the Republicans took over congress. But the shoe is really on the other foot. Because if any sort of Health Care package gets passed, this will insure the primacy of the democratic party for a generation to come, and the Republicans will be reduced to a bigger bunch of nothings than they are already. This is the primal fear that keeps Republicans up at night. They are trying to "talk this recovery away" with negativity up the wazoo- - ignoring the signs of positive economic growth and accentuating the negative news and praying that they're be a whole lot more of that. Were I in congress, therefore, I would be voting for just about any bill that is up for approval, because the stakes are whether or not we can finally drive a stake into the heart of the Republican Party.
One Randi Rhodes program caller pointed out that these days Cops are too proactive in trying to prevent crime that hasn't occurred yet and yet when crime actually does occur, the cops are nowhere. On the "Cops" show you never hear calls from a woman with a stalker out her bedroom window, or a woman whose been raped, or someone about to be robbed or murdered or blackmailed. To the "Cops" show these crimes are apparently unimportant. Instead you get these "drive by arrests". Cops are just cruising around in an apparently crime free city, and happen on a driver with his rear tail light bulb out and what do you know, he has a stash of cocaine and a knife on him. Isn't it interesting that never do these cops just make a garden variety traffic stop or something for speeding. I am reminded of one holideck program that Warf from Startrek was in, where he was on level one and Warf said "This is too easy. There is no challenge". Most of the police activities on "Cops" is strictly "Level One" with highly compliant suspects and you're never in any real danger. But in real high crime areas too often you hear complaints like "Where are the police?" Of course Randi Rhodes pointed out that Police Chief Parker is hailed as one of the LAPD's best police chiefs ever, yet the guy was a racist through and through- - and living under his reign was a nightmare for Blacks.
On a personal note, certain dates are especially bad ones on my callendar. One was September 1st. 2008. Another was June 16th. 2009. Another was July 4th. 2009. My personal property has been and continues to be in jeopardy. Relationships with all three remaining members of my family are shakey at best right now. I am really a person whose friendships are tenuous and dares not test them. I'm really guy who could use a shot of the sort of life changing elixer that Religion perports to offer. I am a guy who in the words of a Doors song, "The future's uncertain and the end is always near". I was thinking of calling this whole posting "This present distress". It is my fondest hope that I look back on my life one year from now and perceive things completely differently from now. At this point in my life, like Captain Pike on StarTrek, if I can't have the real thing, I'll settle for the illusion at this point. If taking a certain medication can change my perception of certain things from black to white, then who am I to argue with any psychotropic drug. It's a hell of a lot easier than getting other people to change. That's for sure. In a letter to someone in the past few days I labeled myself as The Howard Beale of Christianity. What I mean by that is that at one time I thought there was hope that with teamwork and effort and cooperation and a lot of drive, initiative, and persistance, one could achieve success. But then I got the Word from On High, and became a Calvinist Deist. I learned that all of the "deciding" was done before the Universe was Created. God uses the Dr. Phil Mc Graw methodology. Dr. Phil says "Kids have the mistaken idea that first you discuss something and then a decision is made. That isn't how it works. First all of the really important decisions are made among the adults, then you tell the kids." (Selah)
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