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it's easy and useful to make a separation between the fact those miners got out---which is a good thing---and the television sporting event that was made from it (complete with breaks for commercials! yay advertising delivery!)--and another between this remarkable single instance and conditions in the mining industy in general (which are pretty lousy for a whole lot of people). these seem obvious.
what bugs me in this thread is the assumption that if you aren't watching tv and responding as prompted that you're an awful person.
packaged compassion is nothing, really....you sit on your couch and say "yay chilean miners" and feel elevated as a person. but really, you're sitting on your couch watching tv and reacting as you're told to between segments of vital advertising.
i mean, it's fun and all, 33 little melodramas, 33 reunion sequences, 33 reasons to say "yay chilean miners!" and "yay 24/7 cable infotainment outlet!" and "yay me for watching!"
but the point can't really be "yay chile" because, well, i don't remember seeing any threads about the earthquakes in chile a few months ago, nor to i remember any sniffy passive-aggressive remarks about the lack of threads about the earthquake....i mean if being all "yay chile" is such a big deal, be consistent.....but then again neither the earthquake nor the slow painful recovery process played well on tv and certainly didn't lend itself to sporting-event coverage. and we don't feel good about ourselves watching all that debby downer footage about rubble and infrastructure breakdown.
so the chilean miner story---not the situation, but the television event that turned the rescue into 33 mawkish little meodramas----is really about you the consumer. it's really about getting you to spend and entire day experiencing vital advertising and doing it in a context that allows you to come away thinking "how grand everything is" and provides the extra fun and excitement of justifying getting all righteous & snarky when others don't affirm your pre-packaged relation to your own pre-packaged emotions in the way the packaging indicates they should be doing.
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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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