I say it is sad because I think it is sad that for truth in reporting we apparently must turn to comedians.
Steven Colbert is not the first comedian to make socio-political satire his main gig, in fact I suppose if you think about it, nearly all comedy (that requires thinking - so, ummm....maybe I can call it Post Anal Comedy) revolves around social and political events and the contradictory thinking that we require to continue to do (mostly) the opposite of not only what we have as our goals and standards, but also our actual behavior is most often directly (or nearly so) opposite of our "stated" position.
Isn't that bizarre?
I never cared much for Bill Marr but he was certainly "right on target" an awful lot of the time.
Jon Stewart is another very entertaining messenger of truth and despair.
As far back as I can recall, we have had comedians doing the job that belonged, in the Bible for example (though it has been proved mostly a conglomeration of politically motivated stolen and fake history) to "prophets". Recall there were not just major prophets but also minor ones roaming the hills calling local cultures to task and settling disputes.
But now so many, perhaps nearly all or our so called "spiritual" leaders are so wrapped up in their own bigotry and hypocrisy and money making enterprises that they have no idea of the true condition of the societies they pretend to serve.
Those who discover "truth" for themselves reveal it at their own and sure peril (of one sort or another).
Isn't it interesting that comedians, whose job requires them to investigate all our little quirks and weird and contradictory behaviors and fantasies as a result become the real experts on what is TRUE in our society and they seem to deliver a fairly consistant message about how we are being screwed by those in positions of public trust nearly everywhere.
Who else is telling us these things?
NOBODY!
And because the comedians are "not serious - it's comedy after all - a joke - get it?" - they can avoid some of the pitfalls and penalties meted out to anyone who "takes it seriously".
It seems obvious to me that our media are ALL bought and paid for as are all representitives of "parties" (eg. Republican or Democrat) and as such cannot be trusted.
Even the comedy routines we experience are built on propaganda rather than truth to begin with; it is only the "attitudes" of the parties involved that can be truly discerned.
And even more strangely, we who experience this "knowing" that the comedy is true and the network news is the joke, for some reason(s), do nothing.
From where does our complacency stem?
Well, from a lot of areas.
We are brainwashed and drugged and terrorized by our own supposed "protectors".
Both in the local level with education, law enforcement, justice and services and at the larger state and national level, those who have taken the "sacred charge" of protecting our freedoms have instead turned to abuse us and sell off those very principals they were "elected" to protect.
Now, I have said this before and I will say it again.
I believe that those who act in a manner that is intentionally Anti-American, as in trashing the Constitution rather than protecting and enforcing it's aims are in fact Traitors to America and to all Americans and any others who believe in and support our American Ideals.
I also (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm not) believe that during a time of declared war, which we are now in - The War That Will Never End - a "declared" war on Terror and those who support it - well, during a time of war, Traitors are basically "shot at dawn".
Now, lest anyone decide that I am advocating shooting all of our so called "public servants" at all levels, let me declare that I think I am against shooting them, though their crimes against me and my fellow Americans (and others - especially the poor victims of their criminal enrichment exercises such as the so called War Against Terror) do ignite my passion to a degree that I often cannot work or sleep for the distraction, depression and the feeling of being (or my culture being) inadequate to the task of making a remedy to our social ills.
But I do think we should take all the crooks (that's about all of them) out of office, charge, try and penalize them for their crimes and move on to EASILY FIX OUR CULTURE.
Oh, I know.
Every candidate for office has to tell us how "hard and nearly impossible" advances or improvements are and how hard (if they can squeeze enough money out of us) they will have to work to improve our daily lot.
The reality is; firstly, these people have no idea of the issues they speak on and usually invent simply to ignite public passion because that's what gets them remembered and elected or serves to distract the public from their crimes.
Secondly and most importantly:
The issues and problems facing our society and the world can be QUICKLY and EASILY remedied WITHOUT INCREASED SPENDING and WITHOUT LOSS OF LIFE.
I have repeatedly claimed that I could end the war in Iraq and bring home our troops with "practically (cause I can't promise better) no further "non-combatant, non-allied casualties" and relatively zero further spending.
Of course this doesn't go well with all our Federal PIGS who feed at the trough of the likes of Exxon and Haliburton, etc. who are the real causes and beneficiaries of both the terror and the war with all it's pain and atrocities.
And of course, even though President Bush publicly claimed a while back that he would consider ANY alternate plan to resolve the war - the President as well as EVERY Member of the US Senate and US Congress has declined to so much as reply to my offers.
I have published my correspondence with President Bush which can be found in the archives for anyone interested - it even contains my basic plan to end the war in two months or less and points out the one glaring (though no one - and I mean NO ONE BUT ME as far as I can tell ever mentions it - even the prophet comedians miss it since they rely on the "controlled" news for their material) - error that has turned this stupid and illegal operation into the nightmare it is today - though it is SO BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that I have a hard time believing our people are not turned into complete ambivalent zombies already since they seem so blind to the obvious. And that is certainly the plan - to make us all zombies.
Isn't it bizarre that Zombie Parades have become so popular lately? People don't even realize they are making a socio-political statement when they participate! Still, even though they don't realize their deeper motivations, they are participating more because of the affinity they feel toward zombies IMO than their superficial (it's just fun) PC reasons.
And, isn't it interesting that even though this boy in Jenna had his case dismissed that today, all day we are watching and commenting on and commenting on the commenting and on and on this town - all the while watching and listening while all our "supposed" leaders, white, black (or brown, colored, dark, darker or whatever us crackers are supposed to call negros now) claim that "This Is Not A Racial Issue."
What a load of crap and nonsense!
This certainly IS a RACIAL issue.
To try to make this case focus only on the (last and publicized) assault (though it should be tried in a realistic and Constitutionally appropriate manner - and it's not being done that way at all) is SO WRONG!
What sheep we all must be if we can be convinced that this is only about a group of boys beating up another boy at school and not about all the years of INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM that preceded and programmed the community for just this sort of attack.
I wish all 50,000 people who showed up in Jena would just stay and never leave - make it home right now. Wouldn't that be interesting?
And isn't it interesting that YESTERDAYS TERROR (can I call it terror to witness Storm Troopers attack) of the student being tasered and deprived of his Constitutional First Ammendment RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH appears nowhere on todays news?
50,000 darker people milling around a town of 3,000 cracker bigots - even though not much interesting is going on except witnessing all the denial of truth and fact and to see how a District Attorney (they all do it this way) "digs in" as Al Sharpton put it, on his position - regardless of fact, logic or law. (You'd almost think you were in Utah - but it's worse there)
So WHY do the Constitutional Issues get completely ignored?
Could it be that our problems could be so quickly and easily resolved by appealing to the Constitution that it is seen as a "buzz killer" for those who want to keep us distracted and confused.
So it doesn't even get mentioned.
Anyway, last night on the Colbert Report, Steven interviewed an author named Naomi Wolf about a book she wrote and is promoting that sounded like a "must read" to me.
The book "The End Of America" is not scheduled for release till Sept. 30, 2007, so in a couple weeks I guess I might get to read it. If you are reading this sometime after today you might even be able to buy that book and others I recommend right from this website. But not yet.
So while I couldn't read the book I was so interested in and remember it is not the information so much as the authors perspective that was so interesting I did find other things to read by this author.
Being a guy, the article with the word PORN in the title caught my eye right off and as I suspected it is a really interesting article - and it's not pornographic in any way.
I have republished it here from the NY Magazine.
I only take minor exception in a couple areas and mostly think this is an interesting and thought provoking article.
AND....there is a lot of Truth in it - different than what we've been told was the truth so much as to be the exact opposite of what we were told and what we have used as a basis for (apparently wrongly) abusing huge segments of our population. (but for some people - isn't that the idea?)
How are you going to handle that?
Read it yourself.
The Porn Myth
In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.
By Naomi Wolf
From: New York Magazine www.nymag.com
At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.
The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?
She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?
For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.
For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.
The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.
But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.
The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman.
Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.
So Dworkin was right that pornography is compulsive, but she was wrong in thinking it would make men more rapacious. A whole generation of men are less able to connect erotically to women—and ultimately less libidinous.
The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.
“For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”
After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.
Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.
And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in
When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in
She must feel, I thought, so hot.
Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”
“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”
“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”
Additional reading:
Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On.: Internet porn is everywhere; even "nice" guys are hooked. So where does that leave their girlfriends? By David Amsden (
The New Position on Casual Sex: The rise of Internet dating has brought a sexual openness (not to mention one-night stands) to the younger generation not seen since the seventies heyday of Maxwell's Plum. But can there be too much of a good thing? By Vanessa Grigoriadis (
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