Thursday, March 31, 2011

Media Spin

One of the functions of this blog was to represent alternative media. With no budget and living in a van and posting from the library the limitations were quickly reached and I started writing about homeless people in electric carts and film reviews. But that wasn't reaching the potential I knew existed so I devised the plan to document a mad voyage to the arctic circle posing as a person from the future who only wears plaid bell bottom pants. The strategy was based on a few patterns I've seen emerge in my study of effective counter-cultural endeavors:
1)A single driven individual facing insurmountable odds doing something that has almost no interest to anyone.
2)A character who is one minded and unique.
3)An environment that is foreign.
4) A goal that can't be possible but people can relate to on a philosophical level.

Add it all up and you have the Arctic Wolf expedition.

The theory was that by manufacturing media interest I could then operate as a manipulative source of information like my competitors at the neo-conservative think tank known as CNN. I wish it weren't true but any media is manipulative media. The only subjective information is the stuff RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE...which amounts to about 1% of the information we consume these days...which is A TOTAL DISGRACE because of the aforementioned think tanks that manipulate everything they slap on a plate like lunch ladies at Junior High School who must hear the plop of potatoes in their sleep. But I can't rise above a think tank. It's impossible. I don't want to just present facts because the game is not fair, the rules are stacked against me when media outlets can and do interview whomever they want and get the quotes they want.

Example: "Radiation in milk is safe."
"Mother of three believes in Nuclear Power."
Insurance company advertising plays seconds before video of entire town demolished by tsunami.

This is not news at all; this is molding the consumer who has been sold to the advertiser. Noam Chomsky has better essays on this than I'll ever write. He said, "Media doesn't sell their product (newspaper, tv program), they sell the consumer to the advertiser who funds the production.) Compare PBS with CBS and you'll see the difference. But you probably won't see the difference because, as I said, CBS has a death grip on everyone's mentality by using signature devious devices of manipulation and a cocktail of fear and relief. It's barbaric subliminal conditioning but it is legal an is not going anywhere. So why fight fire by shouting "Fire!"?? It's pointless. The only option is to create alternative media that overshadows the original media. And the alternative media will also be manipulative. That part really depressed me because when the paradigm shift ends up with just a mirror image of the original paradigm (A shotgun made from recycled material) then why the fuck am I bothering to do anything? Gandhi liberated India from Britain and then the Muslims and Hindus went at each other's throats like rabid dogs until Pakistan was formed and they've been at war for 60 years. If a nuke is dropped in the near future it will be Pakistan or India doing the dropping. Thanks Gandhi! So they got rid of the foreign oppressor and decided to do the oppression themselves. Am I doing the same thing>? Do I want to overthrow one manipuative media outlet to replace it with my own which will lead to similar insanity in my own name? This is what I ponder as I dig my knees into the blood soaked ceramic tile mosaic fluer de lis. Lately I've noticed that the internet is becoming a mixed media fantasy land where people have their own channels and books that are made in the image of the false prophets of CNN and Fox media. It's getting to the point where only infants have anything I'd call authentic reactions and responses. Everyone else basically mimics celebrities and talk show hosts. The latest craze is contests for products like potato chips that ask people to make their own commercial...and I've noticed the commercials basically parrot 50 years of commercial television and I'm not sure anyone knows what it means to tell the truth anymore. When The Simpsons is censored for Nuclear Power jokes (20 years of making fun of Nuclear Power and when a real meltdown happens they pull the jokes!?? What??) then I feel the puppet string being pulled on tender threads of fiber optics connected to my inner child. Damn them!

My point is that we are in the depths of the most lopsided media era ever. Two major environmental disasters in less than a year and they are both being whitewashed with celebrity meltdowns and low price air fares. That's not a coincidence...it is a strategy that is designed in 50th floor boardrooms with catered vegetable plates (tainted with radiation and illegal mexican skin) and coffee carafs and designer leather shoes and mahogany tables. It's a delicate process to manipuate 700 million people but the strategy of fear and confusion and hot and cold and the ultimate doublespeak messages of "Consumption is Savings" "War is Peace" "Madness is Sanity" have worked for decades and will continue to assault us until an alternative arrives that is so overpowering that the two can't coexist and the people choose a different route. IS it possible to overthrow media using the same electronic highways that are used by the mainstream media? Probably not until ownership (control) of the cables changes hands. My statement is this: I don't like being manipulated and I'm very sensitive to it so the methods do not work on me. If there is a flood coming and you try to manipulate me onto a boat, I would rather drown because your company is worse than death. So, I will work tirelessly to hack at the roots of media manipulation because I believe it is the source of lies that led to the elimination of the plains Indians and the American Bison and now leaves us with radioactive milk that is "OK to drink." It will take some effort but that's the only thing that turns me on these days so I'm willing to work until every corporate boardroom on wall street is a hydroponic pot farm and every cattle ranch grows tomatoes.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.