 John Anger |
 Dixie Moline |
 Countess Apraxina |
 Albert Ruesga |
 Stuart Johnson |
 Sally Wilde |
P O S T E D B Y S T U A R T
The Darfurians “don't know the significance of the fact that Matt Damon is worried about them.”
Get ready to hit the mute button when the Dewars commercials come on. Otherwise enjoy this Washington Week-style satire from our friends at The Onion. Happy Thanksgiving! ...
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
Susan Herr’s recent post on Filmanthropy raises some interesting questions in aesthetics: Why is it so difficult to marry art with advocacy? Why is so much political art shrill or heavy-handed?
Population Communications International, a New York-based nonprofit organization, has, for the past twenty years, pioneered the use of telenovelas in the fight against poverty, AIDS, and other social ills. The organization has politely rejected every socially conscious script I’ve sent them, including this latest, titled, La Flor Apolonia:
(Apolonia is a beautiful woman with big beauty-parlor hair and long nails. Her dress makes a small “X” across her chest, barely concealing her breasts. Marta, her closest friend, wears a white mini-skirt, a bright blue Spandex top, and long, bangly earrings. She has applied her makeup with unmatched zeal. The two women speak in quick, unaccented Spanish.)
Apolonia: Enrique told me that his parents had disowned him. I pitied him, Marta—you’ve seen those big brown eyes of his! (Apolonia juts out her chin defiantly.) The barbarian repaid my kindness by forcing himself on me. (The orchestra swells, heavy on the strings, as Apolonia clenches her teeth.) Now I’m pregnant with Enrique’s baby and I’m afraid I might have AIDS! (Music sting.)
Marta: You were clearly born to suffer, Apolonia! Listen, I know a woman who works at the local health collective. Just the other day she was telling me how they had convened diverse community stakeholders around issues relating to the sourcing of positive health outcomes for economically-challenged persons of female. Let’s go see her …
What’s the secret of seamlessly integrating the preachy earnestness of poverty-fighting messages, say, into melodramas starring sexy Latinas and hunky vaqueros? Apart from being one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, what made Bertolt Brecht so good at using theatre as a forum for political ideas?
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
Some scientists use possible worlds to explain the physical features of our universe. More accessible, perhaps, are the possible world theories that philosophers of language use to model concepts like possibility and necessity.
Closer to home, the October issue of The Atlantic, dubbed the “values issue” by the editors, provides an extended meditation on a possible world that might be familiar to many of us. The magazine takes articles on the “reinvention of philanthropy” and socially responsible investing, and puts them together with ads from car companies and Ralph Lauren.
In the possible world suggested by the editors, unchecked consumption coexists peacefully with a feeling for self-sacrifice. We can, without the slightest pang of conscience, drive to that Sierra Club fundraiser in an SUV; we can discuss our love of animals over a steak dinner with our friends. Not only is this world possible, the Atlantic editors seem to tell us, it’s the world we currently inhabit.
Providing a materialist grounding for this view, the issue includes an article by Olivia Judson on the evolutionary basis of altruism. Kindness and cruelty spring from the same source—the human genome—and we are born to save the planet even as we destroy it.
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Image source: One of the panels from the cover of Roz Chast’s Parallel Universes.
P O S T E D B Y S A L L Y
Everything communicates. Learning what this means is one of the keys to good citizenship and good philanthropy.
I’ll state the case more strongly: The health of our society depends critically on the ability of each citizen to read, listen, and observe deeply; to interpret thickly; and to understand the promises and beguilements of media, both old and new. Because most of us lack these skills, or worse, fail to exercise them, we’re in danger of throwing away our democracy. We leave ourselves at the mercy of those who can exploit our ignorance to advance narrow interests.
Recent history has shown us, in a very dramatic way, how manipulation of the media can take a powerful nation into an immoral, disastrous war against an imagined threat.
The vast majority of Americans simply sleepwalk through the news. We consistently fail to detect propaganda, bias, and censorship in the media we consume.
Just as young people learn about the three branches of government in their civics classes, they should learn to identify lead-ins, angles, and talking points—and think critically about them. When they see an image, they should ask, “What’s missing from it? How was it manipulated? Why was this chosen by the editors from among all possible images?” Instead of passively watching television, they should pay close attention to the carefully constructed juxtapositions of images and sounds; they should make note of who’s given the last word in a discussion; they should challenge the narrow frame of a debate. And they should always make a point of asking, “Who pays for the news?”
I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula. In Europe, it was the Nordic socialist democracies that led the way.
Unfortunately, staying well informed and immunizing ourselves against manipulation by the media is only one battle in the larger war of ideas currently being fought on home turf. Once we know the truth, how will we be motivated to act? And what are the values that will animate us or fail to animate us?
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Favorite media literacy links:
Action Coalition for Media Education
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Source of images: Media Literacy Clearinghouse
P O S T E D B Y J O H N
As I watch the video, I wonder if it might be the projectionist’s labor of love. Did he cobble it together with his art school friends? If so, it’s very well done.
There’s a whiff of subversion in it.
In a world that is bland, colorless, and cold
Where banality grows like a fungus or a mold
There live the boring Sheeple who look just like each other …
My mind conjures the usual suspects. I think of the American polity (myself included), passively bleating while we join the family of nations that commit torture. I think of how disconnected we are from the political process at all levels, where candidates are transformed by polls and big donors into nicely wrapped products we purchase at election time. I think also of the market’s homogenizing influence, of the failure of our schools to produce engaged citizens equipped to think critically ...
Finally I realize what a jackass I am for reading so much into just another car ad …
In a process that’s familiar to historians, philosophers, and others, the outside becomes the inside. Deviance here is identified with the purchasing of a trendy product, and the idea that “this is not your father’s Oldsmobile” is given a violent new spin for these darker, more nefarious times. Ultimately, subversion is subverted.
Is nothing sacred?
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Image source: Tropist
Because he writes like this:
I have an image so private, I hesitate to share it, but often when I hear someone talk to me about what they learned the prior evening on Fox News, what comes to mind is Berlin bombed flat, with a few old women moving about the rubble. That is what a propagandized population will endure, to the end, for its delusions and those of its leaders. Some will follow our leadership all the way. Others of us will dissent. How that plays out will be the existential crisis that will mark the meaning of our lives. Then the philanthropist and patriot will be one in sacrifice. Art or artfulness has never in my lifetime been more needful. Now we will relearn to read works of literature written in dark times, not as illuminating texts, but as models to imitate as best we can as we face crises no less daunting than those of a satirist, say, in Imperial Rome, or Augustan England, or as Loyal Subject of the Crown in Boston, circa 1775. We must learn to write better and read better if we are to hold the mirror up to nature, and remain free as writers, citizens, and a people. God Bless America.
God bless America.
P O S T E D B Y J O H N
I was in a movie theater recently to watch a summer blockbuster when this public service ad appeared. It was prepared for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a program of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. It elicited snickering and hooting from the mostly young crowd.
Were these ads tested on focus groups? If so, were they on drugs?
Lindsay: “Like, oh wow, a talking dog.”
P O S T E D B Y A L
Some moll goes by the handle “Glitteractica_Cookie” put a contract on my good friend Albert’s bona fides, calling him “a voice of the anti-SL backlash” for his post on Second Life, that virtual world everyone’s talking about.
All right, all right, he brought this pile of bricks on himself. Last time he went virtual, he was run out of the eleventh dimension for claiming a duck with wax lips was more whimsical than a goose in a bonnet. People who share personal reflections on their experiences in Second Life and are “very critical” deserve to get sapped, I say. Suck it up.
But I owe Albert a debt: he once gave my mudder a picture of Valentino in the altogether. She died last year—very, very happy. Mama mia!
If you wanna write Albert, he’s laying low. Last I heard, he was in the Sims’ Virtual Witness Protection Program.
Smoky Joe, Scruggs, you out there?
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