The Vast Waistband of TV

This Won't Be Easy, I Know

I'm not a TV snob. So, my warnings about TV have nothing to do with mindless entertainment, lowbrow culture, or any other argument presented by the academic highbrows or "PBS only" viewers. This isn't going to be a "shoot your TV" scolding, because I know you won't do it. "American Idol," "Survivor" and "Ax Men" may well be mindless entertainment for us lowbrows, but it's not really very dangerous to our mind, body and spirit. And in spite of the popular idea that advertising is the main danger on TV, I really don't think so. It's annoying more than anything else.

I'm going to tell you what really is dangerous though: The "CBS Evening News", "The O'Reilly Factor," "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," and absolutely anything featuring Wolf Blitzer, Sanjay Gupta, or David Gregory. You want poison? You want the ultimate QuarterPounder (TM) with double bacon and extra cheese for your brain - just tune into "Hardball" or "Glen Beck"  -  or God help you -  "The Situation Room." This is the carcinogen of the mind and soul - manufactured news laden with fear mongering and dripping with fascist idealism that shifts your life into neutral with lots of angry tail chasing. TV news is the mind pudding that forms the basis for almost all American beliefs, and thus actions. If we're physically obese from too much junk food, we're mentally malnourished from the steady diet of processed junk news.

No, I'm not kidding here at all. This is the heart and soul of socio-political brainwashing. Control Central - Home Base - the Mother Ship - the Command and Control Center of the most exploitive process ever developed on planet earth. The enslavement - and probable destruction -  of the human race begins right here with the four-pronged attack on human consciousness - network news. Hey, they don't call TV shows "programming" for nothing.  This is where Mencken's Boobus Americanus (that's you and me, brother) are trained how and what to think, who we can vote for, how and why we should work, which health concerns are valid and which aren't, and most of all, what ideas and issues are allowable in public discourse. In short, the business of the TV news business is setting the American agenda and selling the American narrative.

Setting the Agenda
The news function as we know it, takes the universe of unlimited human potential and separates out everything which is dangerous or disadvantageous to the establishment and oligarchy. It turns the remainder into soft, safe mind pudding.  From health care to taxes to wars to marriage laws it is the role of the establishment's mass media to set the range of allowable public discussion.

Every aspect of our economic and political life comes before the establishment opinion making machinery. Ideas, policies and people get chopped and diced and processed by the public relations industry buried in the so-called think tanks. Here, public desire is transformed into profitable public agenda by wordsmiths, pollsters and party apparatchiks. An agenda that is safe and beneficial to the ruling oligarchy, and its courtiers in the Washington-NY Establishment - that body charged with developing and enforcing the American agenda.

In the bowels of this PR machinery, the loud and confusing torrent of public creativity, is filtered, sifted, and processed into a colorless, tasteless, smooth syrup-slow stream of stupefying party propaganda. We hear you out there America!, they say. Then, from the mouths and hands of the preposterously over-paid newsreaders and keyboard jockeys - the Courics, Blitzers, Kleins, Wills, Krugmans, and O'Reillys  - come the freshly squeezed tasty messages bottled in two great tasting flavors: Republican Cherry, and Democratic Blueberry! Let the taste test begin!

They don't care which flavor you prefer, both are bottled at the same source. Both are immensely profitable. Neither is dangerous or threatening. Tastes Great! Less Filling! Party on!

Nowhere is this more important than the vetting of political party candidates. Make absolutely no mistake, by the time anyone gets near enough to you for you to vote for, they have passed the establishment two-party litmus test for acceptability. The test is quite simple, and here it is in short form:

1. Pledge an oath to global capitalism, and by inference Wall Street
2. Pledge an oath to corporate personhood and extending corporate rights and privilege in America
3. Pledge an oath to the two party system, and by inference the reality of one party
4. Pledge an oath to leave Pentagon and intelligence budgets to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to decide

With just that simple list we can easily see how candidate vetting by the establishment works. McCain, Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Dole, and Bush are "100% Grade A" acceptable candidates for President. None are threatening to any interest of the oligarchy. But whoa! Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader or Dennis Kucinich are absolutely "REJECTED," and will be mocked, vilified, ridiculed and finally marginalized by the establishment regardless of initial public support.

Ron Paul has consistently found public favor in significant numbers, but found only ridicule and abuse from the establishment. Likewise, Kucinich and Nader. In the very early debates before the marginal candidates were kicked out, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich easily drew greater visceral response from the public than any of the eventually blessed candidates.  This is agenda setting at the highest level. (I'm not endorsing those candidates, I am only endorsing greater choice.)

Inventing the American Narrative

This is the other Great Command of the establishment. How do you rewrite history as it is being made? You control the narrative in real time through the news. America has a story, and that story will be invented and told continuously until everyone can repeat it. Whatever the current issue, it is the job of the establishment to write the proper script. If you are going to war, a story will be needed to keep the public on board. If corporations are making new demands, a story will be needed for the public to swallow the medicine. There's no important aspect of American life that doesn't have a standard establishment script.

The American Dream, American Exceptionalism, Operation Desert Storm, Manifest Destiny, The Global War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the Greatest Generation, Operation Iraqi Freedom, God Bless America, The Good War, and on we go spinning up yarns of feel good rationalizations that can be reduced into 3-second sound bites that hit like rabbit punches one after another on drive time radio, or prime time TV.

The news machine's interlocking parts are TV, radio, publishing, newspapers, and now the Internet. Assembled into a circular form, the machine takes on these characteristics: there no checks or stops, the outputs directly feed the inputs (use your own vivid imagination there), and the result is a self regenerating echo chamber.

Write column for a newspaper? Turn it into a NYT best seller. Take the book on a tour of the TV punditry shows, and generate some controversy. Take that controversy and blog about it on the political web portals. Fuel your radio show by reading the controversial blogs on air! Make a YouTube video of the radio host reading the blog post! Twitter about the YouTube video! Write a second column about these new twitter posts! And yes, that should be enough fuel for a second book to kick off round two!

What are the recurring themes in the American narrative? Here they are condensed into talking points:

1. America is the singularly God-blessed and morally pure force for good in the world.
2. We lead the world in every possible category of material and spiritual achievement.
3. Because of #1 and #2, we are never wrong, and thus not subject to critique or reproach from any International or "foreign" source, including countries, courts or institutions.
4. America is classless, democratic, just and free.

From this rudimentary dogma, plus the process of controlling language and its meanings, the establishment propaganda machinery controls the public narrative as seen on TV, read in newspapers, or heard on the radio. The prime goal of the propaganda is to control the breadth of debate.

Using the Iraq War as an example, three allowable narratives were piped into the mass media: Iraq has WMD; Saddam Hussein was secretly behind the 9-11 attacks; and the US is bringing democracy and freedom to a repressed country. Anyone could come on TV and pontificate about those positions -  pro or con - either is fine. But, those are just three of a dozen or more probable causes for that war. What you could NOT hear on TV - unless it was simply for ridicule - was anyone suggesting Imperialism, or desire to control the world's second largest oil reserves, or desire to form a bulwark for Israel against Iran, or the desire of the Pentagon to test new weapons systems. Those positions existed aplenty, but were not allowed to be uttered on TV.

One more example from the present. In health care reform we've been handed just two establishment approved choices to argue at the water cooler: 1) a mandate to buy private insurance without a public option; 2) a mandate to buy insurance with a public option. Feel perfectly free to take your pick! Everything else is off the table. This is agenda setting. It eliminates at the root, any discussion or public debate that doesn't immediately serve the oligarchy. This in spite of the well-documented fact that Americans have wanted for many years a universal health system, like Medicare for everyone. That option is pronounced "off the table." It may not be seriously considered in public forums. It won't be debated on TV. It won't be discussed in the NY Times. It's not acceptable to the oligarchy because it would cause a reverse flow of wealth downward. Sorry people, that's unacceptable. But don't worry, we've made up some fine other choices for you.

So let's close the loop now. This process of control, conditioning and agenda setting is only possible through ubiquitous mass-media programming. That means TV, radio and newspapers. The ideal delivery vehicle is "news" because news carries a built-in illusion that it is a virtuous public service. The perception is created that engaging in the editing or broadcasting of the news is as sacred as hearing a confession, or baptizing an infant. It's pure as snow, truer than true, absolutely unbiased, fair and balanced, and morally righteous beyond reproach. In short, it's credible, believable, consumable! It goes down like a Big Mac on an empty stomach.

That perception is absolutely false. News is a scientific product of the public relations industry. It is manufactured and manipulated just like junk food - no nourishment, full of artificial ingredients, lots of flavor, goes down easy, doesn't require any thinking. Pure poison for the mind. But don't fret, there's an antidote!

I Bet It Won't Kill You

In a later post, I'll talk specifically about news and how it kills. But for now, I invite you to try a short antidote and experiment. I know it's far too drastic to suggest you take your TV to the dump, so let's be more cautious, circumspect and conservative. Let's try (PLEASE, I beg you!) going on a news diet for one month:

1. No TV news programs of any kind. No cable, no network news. No political TV.
2. No TalkRadio. No Limbaugh, no NPR, no left or right jabberwocky. 
3. No newspapers. Ok, read the sports and comics and movie section, but no news.
4. No Internet news portals - no NewsMax, HuffPo, Salon, etc.

It's just a month. It isn't going to kill you, and it isn't going to cost you any money. Watch your crime shows, your reality shows or what have you (read a book?) - just stay off the news. At the end of month, you will be like a dried out alcoholic, or a detoxed drug user. You will have a brighter outlook on your life - guaranteed. You will begin then to see, feel or sense exactly how you were being manipulated. TV news is a horrible disease, but there is an antidote!