Politics: Overload
I guess I just can't take it. The plastic sheeting and the duct tape and the orange alert based on lies! lies! lies! and everything else. Something just snapped. I don't care if Mohamed el Baradei and Hans Blix told the UN that Saddam Hussein killed JFK. I don't. And I can't follow it anyhow: Blix report mixed, says the New York Times. CNN says "The US doesn't care". The Washington Post says that several countries responded to the Blix report by saying we need more inspectors, and that this was a "blow" to Bush. On ABCNews.com, Colin Powell (who must be a polyglot, because he never wears a UN translation device in photos) says that Iraq is playing tricks on the UN inspectors.
Honestly, how is anyone supposed to make sense of this? This is what happened right before the elections, you see. The Bush administration moved the war so far to the forefront, bulldozed over every other issue at play in each state race, and then pushed it one notch further. Everything just snapped. Everybody was in favor of war! Everybody hated terrorism! Nobody wanted to listen to anything else, we just wanted to be left alone.
Well today, it happened for me, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't affecting a lot of other people. We've been sent to the Home Depot for tape, told not to bother with the tape, told we'll suffocate if we use the tape, told we should probably still use it anyhow, and made fun of for buying tape and now we're fed up.
I think the media will be both victim and accomplice of this overload. Most notably, you will see very little coverage of the massive protests planned this weekend for New York and San Francisco as well as about three hundred other towns here and around the world. In the United States, the war protests are irrelevant, because for the media the war is a done deal. Media people don't think about timelines the way regular people do. The quarter of a million people who protested in Melbourne, Australia today (which is tomorrow there, natch) obviously don't believe that the war is a done deal. But the media people are regular people, too, so they could (and often do) fall prey to their own version of overload, where they are jaded about the new news because the only news that matters is the old news, presented over and over and over again.
So what do we do? I can't tell you. I wish there was a way to shear through the madness. And I know there are people who are un-affected by this stuff. But the relentlessness isn't our fault. The constant stream of information, the shifting sands of perspective always tilted toward war war war weren't built by us. Maybe it's time to declare a blackout. V-chip your MSNBC and your CNN and your Fox News Channel! Cancel your subscription to the newspaper (there isn't anything new anymore)! Manage the information that goes into your gourd, protecting yourself from the insanity. Force yourself to the surface of this morass and think for yourself!
Happy Valentines Day.
I guess I just can't take it. The plastic sheeting and the duct tape and the orange alert based on lies! lies! lies! and everything else. Something just snapped. I don't care if Mohamed el Baradei and Hans Blix told the UN that Saddam Hussein killed JFK. I don't. And I can't follow it anyhow: Blix report mixed, says the New York Times. CNN says "The US doesn't care". The Washington Post says that several countries responded to the Blix report by saying we need more inspectors, and that this was a "blow" to Bush. On ABCNews.com, Colin Powell (who must be a polyglot, because he never wears a UN translation device in photos) says that Iraq is playing tricks on the UN inspectors.
Honestly, how is anyone supposed to make sense of this? This is what happened right before the elections, you see. The Bush administration moved the war so far to the forefront, bulldozed over every other issue at play in each state race, and then pushed it one notch further. Everything just snapped. Everybody was in favor of war! Everybody hated terrorism! Nobody wanted to listen to anything else, we just wanted to be left alone.
Well today, it happened for me, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't affecting a lot of other people. We've been sent to the Home Depot for tape, told not to bother with the tape, told we'll suffocate if we use the tape, told we should probably still use it anyhow, and made fun of for buying tape and now we're fed up.
I think the media will be both victim and accomplice of this overload. Most notably, you will see very little coverage of the massive protests planned this weekend for New York and San Francisco as well as about three hundred other towns here and around the world. In the United States, the war protests are irrelevant, because for the media the war is a done deal. Media people don't think about timelines the way regular people do. The quarter of a million people who protested in Melbourne, Australia today (which is tomorrow there, natch) obviously don't believe that the war is a done deal. But the media people are regular people, too, so they could (and often do) fall prey to their own version of overload, where they are jaded about the new news because the only news that matters is the old news, presented over and over and over again.
So what do we do? I can't tell you. I wish there was a way to shear through the madness. And I know there are people who are un-affected by this stuff. But the relentlessness isn't our fault. The constant stream of information, the shifting sands of perspective always tilted toward war war war weren't built by us. Maybe it's time to declare a blackout. V-chip your MSNBC and your CNN and your Fox News Channel! Cancel your subscription to the newspaper (there isn't anything new anymore)! Manage the information that goes into your gourd, protecting yourself from the insanity. Force yourself to the surface of this morass and think for yourself!
Happy Valentines Day.
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