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from time to time, you get an idea of how this administration operates in the world---what happens behind the Huge Curtain of Paranoia linked to the bogeyman of choice since 2001: the Terrorist--across the series of interesting coups, an obvious geopolitical "vision" being implemented in places far away that would require lots of information to situate--coverage of a coup in someplace like kyrgyzstan, for example, would require not only action footage of the coup itself, but also "where is this place" type stuff. no doubt, this kind of density of information would prompt many tv viewers to wander away from their screens to get sandwiches or something and thereby miss vital advertising. better to keep information short and punchy, to reduce the sense of linkage to information to the most base imaginable level (paranoia works--it prevents folk from wandering away to get sandwiches, thereby missing vital advertising)--even if the cost of this short/punchy model is no understanding whatsoever of the american modes of "managing" the planet that the neocons obviously see as a vast american colony--no idea of why folk in other places might have views of the states that cannot be jammed into the dynamic paranoia/cheerleading that seems to shape most tv coverage of the planet--what matters is not what you know of the world, what you know of the american role in the world, but that you do not wander away from the tv to get a sandwich or something and thereby miss vital advertising.
this absurd mode of information transmittal--the power of which is evident--reduces many to simply wondering "why dont they like us?"
if this is as far as you can think your way into situations like georgia, it is no wonder that the dud-grenade seems surreal, unmotivated. the fact that coverage cannot even decide whether the grenade was thrown or placed is of a piece with it. if the key to the truncated, foreshortened world presented on television news is the pseudo-accuracy of the tight shot, the reduced context, then its inverse--the wobbly image, the lack of visual resolution, the implication of contexts beyond the coverage limits of the reactionary american television news system--could become a moment of critical reflection on this system and its limits. but the problem with wobbly images is that they circulate in a television context of sharply defined pseudo-information, and so tend to dissolve, go away, be forgotten. what determines "reality" has less to do with information than the quality of factoids.
why dont "they" like us? could you bring me a beer, martha? vital advertising is coming.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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