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otto---tonight i am going to a playoff game in boston--it's a long story, but the outcome in this case will be mind-bending---i went to a game once before and sat in the same ridiculous seats as i will tonight---the boston garden is in a sense a temple of television--the enormous monitor dominates the court--the "reality" of the game is what passes across it more than what is happening in 3-d, in a curious way--whenever there is a controversial call, everyone looks up to see the replay. whenever anyone appears on the screen, they become a transient celebrity. it is the theater of the domination of television: lasers emanate from it and strobe across the stands--everything about the space is centered on the electronic tablernacle that floats over it, that determines it, that reflects as it determines.
the wright thing is about television, nothing more nothing less. it is about the power accorded it. it is singular only in the emptiness of the "situation"--but it is because of its situational emptiness that its nature is particularly evident. television is **the**ideological relay system in the united states. television is **the** apparatus of opinion management and co-ordination. in a television dominated context like the election cycle, it is really secondary how little is at stake in any given situation--it becomes something through repetition, and that repetition has effects. one of these effects is this thread. another is what this thread is about in the world. that world is also mediated by television.
that we are still talking about this is an indicator of the power of the medium and our collective servility in the face of it.
so it is nothing--but it is a determinate nothing, an indicator of the black hole at the center of american pseudo-democracy, the boundary condition machine that for the most part frames in what we think and frames out what we do not, frames in "legitimate" views and frames out everything else.
it is a joke, otto, but it's a really fucking big joke and you and i and everyone else lives that joke.
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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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