Media Artifact

In the coverage of Dean taking the DNC helm, hardly a story is filed without reference to The Scream. These references make me scream.

There never was a Dean Scream. It didn't happen.

Not in real life, anyway.

Everybody knows the scream was a glitch, an event that happened on television and nowhere else. It did not happen in the room where Howard Dean gave his speech while hundreds tried to hear him. Everyone knows that the din of the crowd drowned out the sound coming out of Howard Dean's body. But the unidirectional microphone picked up Howard and excluded everthing else.

It happened on television, but not in real life. It was a media artifact, obscuring the truth, much like patient motion artifact obscures the data in an MRI test, making it impossible to know what is truly going on in the body.

The media artifact was a better story (so what if it wasn't true) so it got told. Decisions were made on the basis of it being true.

How many media artifacts obscure our body politic these days? How many decisions are being made on the basis of artifact rather than fact? How long can the body of democracy stand it?

The Iconography Has The Power!

oh, yeah. 

credits

what he/she said

well put

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I didn't really watch The Game, the Annual American Holy Moment. I like the commercials, though I expected drivel this year in the wake of the Gestapoization of Things.

Drivel, yes. But don't forget the drek.

I'm sure many will rave about the commercial with the very-good-looking actors playing soldiers coming home, and all the thank you, thank you, thank yous, dissolving with feel-good smarm into the Anheuser-Busch logo.

I was caught up in the emotion of it -- till I saw that corporate logo. It made me think: The country, The United States of America, is gone; the Corporation survives.

The Corporation thanks the soldiers for their sacrifice.

et et redux

I was right as usual. We are headed back to the days of pre-revolutionary France. Are there no honorable Republicans left in congress to stand up to the new Mussolini? Because the Dems are reduced (by the American People, rabble that they have become) to whimper and discomfort signifying less than nothing.