Even pornography knows the difference between the stage and the customer. Today's Americans have so lost the rules of the theater that their taste and knowledge now extends into the Coliseum rather than Shakespeare. This ultimate "reality" show is neither Art nor Theater. It is life. The rule of the marketplace is that people choose what they "want" but only the most unsophisticated would claim that the environment doesn't shape that "want." A depraved environment creates a depraved desire. We were taught that the only control we had over our future was in choosing the environment that would shape us with intelligence, integrity and a knowledge of quality.
The purpose of Art is to make us wise in life and to mirror real life in such a way that it gives us options and makes an ideal possible. What is described below and being practiced by the Media "marketplace" today is an obscenity. Perhaps that is its strongest point because Art has become so debased in crass commercialism and in an insensitive and "experience deficient" public that the only thing left is to remedy that deficiency of experience in a blood bath of the real. Television has the modern Coliseum where we can't tell the difference between the local Fourth of July show and the death of a million people. Now there are those who say, "we didn't hit a million people" but before this war is over there will be more than a million Iraqis dead from our decision to go to war. In New York we learned the difference between the movie "Forth of July" where the Aliens destroyed the World Trade Center and the actual destruction. That was the problem of the World Trade Center bombing and the Pentagon. Television does that. Some abroad were so disconnected that they wrote books about how the Pentagon was NOT hit by a plane. Shock and Awe in Baghdad looked like the celebration of the Centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge or the passing of the Millennium. But the reality here is that New Yorkers didn't choose to be in those movies and removing the debris for a year looking for some piece of your dead in a garbage dump, one handful at a time, instead of a stately funeral with a body or ashes to throw in the ocean, has made citizens like the NYCity Police Department very jaded and skeptical of Anti-war efforts. It would be helpful if we could be taught by the teachers that Art and Life are intertwined but that life loses the benefits of Art as a profession and Art disappears when they actually touch. Every stripper on the stage knows the difference and the fans, of Rock Stars, enthusiasm (drummed up by PR people for money) extending into the street, often creates the finish of the career and destroys the normal aspects of a performers life. Because it is simple commerce we tolerate it but it is philosophically and aesthetically primitive. A profession that is so basic that it is normal to hear of a child who wrote a song that "Hit" and made a fortune in sales. Not long ago a 14 year old Georgia child with little musical background had platinum records while America's greatest composers go wanting for audiences due to the fact that their music is for grown ups. It is so strange to hear Bush and the Media complain about the Iraqis not following the rules of war as if the destruction of home and family followed rules. Americans understood that in our Revolution and sent the British home packing with our "terrorist" tactics that utterly shattered the "rules of war." The "Green Mountain Boys" and Ethan Allen used the same tactics in the forest that we are now complaining about Sadaam's Republican Guards using in the desert. Men with common clothes fighting like the uniformed soldiers. What an original idea? Recently the public was so historically illiterate that it went after a Democratic Representative for saying such a thing. How ignorant of the "rules of war" and the history of America they were. How embarrassing to see us turn and chew our own hands off when the hands told us the door was hot as if the problem were the hands rather than the fire behind the door. I am sorry to read what Keith said about the B52s and the Media's whimpering about the "evil" Sadaam has made it difficult for me to remember that he is on the other side. But the difference is that in Baghdad the same middle and lower class people that Bush is ravaging over here with his tax cuts are being ravaged by American bombers over there. The time has come for truth and the lies that have been told for political gain by this gang of thugs in our government are all too common in Democracies. These are the times when Democracies fold and choose a Dictator to remove the ugliness and save the day. Today we have Coriolannus and Titus Andronicus or Romeo Juliet as the Shakespeare plays being taught to children. On the Indian reservation we studied Julius Caesar. REH March 25, 2003 Shock, Awe and Razzmatazz in the Sequel By MICHIKO KAKUTANI A decade or so after the Vietnam War ended, in the wake of a legion of Vietnam movies, some veterans put bumper stickers on their cars that read, "Vietnam was a war, not a movie." They did not want people to forget the losses that they and their comrades had sustained during the war. They did not want people to relegate their memories of that bloody and divisive war to flickering images on the silver screen. With the new engagement in Iraq, however, the Pentagon and television news coverage are blurring the lines between movies and real life as never before, turning viewers into 24-hour couch voyeurs. In the opening days of the war the focus on television was almost entirely on the fireworks spectacle of the American air attack on Baghdad - which looked on the small screen like a son et lumi�re show, not the deadly bombing of a city of 4.5 million people - and on heroic and often unrepresentative images that deliberately recalled photographs and famous cinematic sequences: soldiers planting an American flag in Iraq with Iwo Jima-like determination; caravans of our troops driving across the desert, made famous by "Lawrence of Arabia"; a soldier tearing down a billboard of Saddam Hussein while video cameras rolled and smiling Iraqis looked on. There were fewer images thus far on American television of the painful costs of war. While much of the world from the Middle East to the Philippines had seen videotape of American prisoners of war, broadcasters here initially elected not to show these scenes, and the networks said they would probably never broadcast the full version of the tape. American television showed little tape of Iraqi civilians affected by the bombing of Baghdad and little of the sometimes fierce resistance American, British and Australian forces are meeting. The start of the war caused business at movie theaters to drop by 25 percent on Wednesday as people stayed home to watch the war, and snack-food sales and restaurant deliveries thrived. The opening salvos of the war had taken the place of prime-time entertainment, and television stations did their best to serve up gaudily produced coverage: the war in Iraq as the ultimate in reality television, as the apotheosis of every favorite Hollywood genre, from the combat thriller to the coming-of-age tale to the blow-'em-up, special-effects extravaganza. As he watched the "shock and awe" bombing that lit up the Baghdad sky on Friday , the veteran reporter Peter Arnett exclaimed, "An amazing sight, just like out of an action movie, but this is real." In the last week other commentators and viewers were drawing a lot of movie analogies too. The burning oil-well fires elicited comparisons to science-fiction movies; the plight of seven Tennessee families who had sent pairs of fathers and sons off to the war brought comparisons to "Saving Private Ryan." Allusions to the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers" were ubiquitous, and the postbombing videotapes of Saddam Hussein (which might have starred one of his doubles) drew comparisons to the comedy "Dave," in which a look-alike fills in for an ailing American president, and "The Prisoner of Zenda." Even the Iraqis got into the act: in the days before the war, Iraqi television played music from the movie "Gladiator" to rally Baghdad residents. References to the movies also occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, planned by media-savvy Al Qaeda operatives who presumably knew how their acts would play on television around the world. But in that case, the comparisons with "Independence Day" and "Towering Inferno" were expressions of people's inability to get their minds around the horror, their failure to find real-life precedents for what they had seen. There is an element of this inability on the part of eyewitnesses to the war, but there is also an element of willful sensationalism and sentimentality on the part of producers who want to keep viewers from switching channels. As for Pentagon planners, who have had a longtime alliance with Hollywood and who spoke of their "shock and awe" campaign in terms of high-tech special effects, they hoped from the start to present a sanitized view of the war, a strategy inevitably foundering. In the hour before President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein expired, cable channels ran ticking clocks on their screens, the same sort of clock that ABC would later use in counting down to the Oscars. There were also the portentous logos: "The Final Hour" and "Zero Hour." After Friday's air assault on Baghdad, television anchors took to promising viewers that there was more "shock and awe" to come, and military analysts talked about how new technology had made the Pentagon "more imaginative than it's been in the past" and "more creative." It all might have been a trailer for the new disaster movie "The Core," due this month, in which the Colosseum in Rome and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco are destroyed with a "Matrix"-worthy volley of special effects. But here it may be recalled that many television networks, including ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox, are owned by multimedia corporations well practiced in the manufacture of entertainment. Happy-talk anchors, more accustomed to talking about DKNY and MTV, giddily tossed around terms like "MOAB" (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or the "mother of all bombs") and "B.D.A." (bomb damage assessment), while fashionistas debated who was this war's hottest Scud Stud and Studette. ABC featured computerized graphics called "Virtual View," which took the audience on video-game-like tours of Iraq from the air. Fox ran exclamatory headlines like "The Ultimate Sacrifice" and "Weapons Scandal." And MSNBC - which concocted patriotic promos for itself with American-flag-draped photomontages, martial music and the words "Our hearts go with you" - peppered its coverage with Olympics-style profiles of American soldiers and "Top Gun" shots of airmen climbing into their planes. The first gulf war of 1991, which kicked off the cable-news mini-series form, pioneered this sort of hype, but the coverage of the current war has taken it to a new level. "The characters are the same: the president is a Bush, and the other guy is Hussein," Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, told USA Today. "But the technology - the military's and the media's - has exploded." He likened the change to "the difference between Atari and PlayStation," and added that "this may be one time where the sequel is more compelling than the original." Though some television teams with the troops provided us with remarkable scenes of the war, giving us unprecedented glimpses of fighting as it unfurled in real time, such images were rarely situated by producers in any meaningful context. Glimpses of firefights, shot in the green Kryptonite glow of night vision, ran on the cable networks like outtakes from one of those car chases that routinely run on local television in California, and many cable channels kept split-screen shots of Baghdad on for the better part of the day, determined not to miss the dropping of a single photogenic bomb. Just as news and entertainment have developed a cozy relationship, so have war and war movies developed an increasingly incestuous relationship. Following the first gulf war, CNN cashed in on its coverage by selling videotape highlights of the war, including a six-cassette gift pack. Three months ago, hoping to have a timely hit like the post 9/11 success of "Black Hawk Down" (which dramatized the failed United States mission in Somalia), HBO broadcast "Live From Baghdad," a television movie about CNN's live coverage of the first gulf war from the Iraqi capital. It is a measure of our post-modern age of information overload that people increasingly see themselves as performers or spectators, roles that lend a self-consciousness to their own actions and detachment to the experiences of others. The Los Angeles Times reported that when the military liaison at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, saw ABC's recent documentary "Profiles From the Front Line," which featured soldiers from the base, he observed, "It wasn't `Saving Private Ryan' - that's what everyone was hoping for." Because this impulse to blur the lines between the real and the fictional is so potent, newscasters repeatedly reminded audiences that the live scenes of the war they were seeing weren't a movie. But coming in the midst of television's razzmatazz coverage of the war, those reminders felt a lot like those coy titles that run at the end of docudramas: "This was based on a real story." In this case, reminders are meant to give the audience a racy frisson of danger, rather than a sober appreciation of the solemn business of war. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
