Lately, I am filled with the knowledge that change will come. For the six months of feeling stuck, this is my revelation. I have mostly Democracy Now to thank, reminding me that what I am concerned with is a broad professional movement not only occupied by left over hippies who are trying to meet young girls, though there are a fair amount of those as well.

This morning they did a piece on the media being for sale, as everyone well knows radio and television are just a venue for selling and nothing more save a few public efforts that are also being stifled and manipulated. You can be fully confident that when you look to the US mass media to bring you your information and culture it is a pitch and you're getting what someone else wants you to get. You can pour over the New York Times and NPR, you are not getting the full story. I don't know that it is ever possible to bring all of the facts foward because so much of what is being decided is carefully guarded from any kind of public exposure. Stories are pulled out of the newspaper every day, people afraid to alienate readers or advertisers and lose sales.

The big Newsweek story of last week and the week before is an example of why the government really feels it needs to control the media. Burning the Koran is apparently a method of interrogation and Newsweek is expected to take responsibility for the fatal rioting that resulted from the piece they ran about it. I am sure that the problem wasn't that Newsweek reported on this happening but that it did happen. The government is saying the story gives a bad impression of the United States. I would have to argue that the practice of burning a holy book with absolutely no regard is what gives the bad impression.

But then if you think about it, the only equivalent we even have to the Koran is the dollar because although GW would like to see it otherwise there isn't just one reigning religion here, though the largest is easily christianity. And of that pious minority who do actually honor the ten commandments and other basic tenets of christianity (no premarital sex being one of the largest and least upheld,) I don't think you could find an equal level of passion amongst them. The one thing that unites us all is the dollar and people in other countries burn American money in front of American newscameras every day. We don't throw riots over it, our government just riots on a larger scale, on our "behalf," i.e. without our consent. Newsweek has now been guilted into running a story explaining that burning the Koran is just an intelligence interrogation method.

What any of this means, I don't know. I'm trying to understand so fault me or whatever but this is my diary so I can go on forever if I want so HA. Go look at polaroid scene if you're bored. I probably will later too.

23 May 2005 - 12:24 PM

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