Hello John, Glad to hear you and Lu had a good time in Reno.
I lived once for a year without a tv. It was a shock to see it again. Some of it can be vulgar, such as when CNN spends 15 minutes showing you scenes of horror from Haiti then breaks for a Sham Wow commercial. My solution is to record everything in advance, then fast-forward through the commercials. I haven't actually watched a commercial all the way through in over a year. I too was moved by the debacle in Port Au Prince. So much so that I made a donation to the Red Cross International Relief Fund the next day. My company offers to match donations to charitable organizations, so my first stop was the matching gifts web page they have. What I learned is that it is monumentally, convolutedly, difficult to get a donation matched. There are forms to fill out and _mail_ in. What's wrong with the send button? There are receipts to be copied, and you must be sure your donation is going to an approved charity; but, they don't actually provide a list, saying only that it must be an organization eligible to receive tax deductible charitable donations. After 30 minutes of trying to decipher all this I just went to the Red Cross site, made my donation online, and saved off the receipt. I figure I can take care of the matching stuff later. The company says they only pay out matches once a quarter anyway, so there's no rush. That's too bad, though, considering that the Haitians would probably like to get a little help before the end of the physical quarter. The next day, an email appeared in my work inbox. The company was announcing in bold letters that it was making a donation of $50,000 for Haitian relief. Everything about this email was designed to demonstrate what a good guy the company is. If email came with sound-effects, this one would crow. Later that night I got curious. That $50,000 donation they were so proud of worked out to be a smaller percentage of the company's annual profits than my donation was to my annual income. For me to make my donation means that Kenny and I will be doing without a few luxury things this month. I don't believe the company will be doing without on account of theirs. Mary -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Carl Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 12:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [MD] Mediated Objectivism and me See the bubble-headed bleached blonde she comes on at five. She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye. It's interesting when people die; we love dirty laundry. D. Henley So I had a nice time in Reno with my wife. I lost $30, which is about my limit, saw a lot of interesting sights, fading Babylons being a fascination of mine. Watched tv, saw lots of dead bodies - live! Rhymes with "jive", not "give". CNN Reporter: "It's hard to sleep or rest, there are so many stories to tell." Translation: We gotta get these cameras everywhere there are dead bodies while we still have a chance to film them for our audience's edification and viewing pleasure. Lu and I were not horrified or saddened by the spectacle at all. It was all just objectified reality presented between commercials. No real connection or identification with tragedy on our parts, it seems so distant. It IS so distant. Very soon a gallows-humour reaction sets in, looking for the absurdity, maybe to avoid the humanity. But on the way home, I listened to BBC Radio and a different reaction came. A female interviewer breaks down in sobs, a woman screams upon finding her dead son in some rubble, the dad interviewed through a translator - he is distraught because he is afraid he will not be able to find a wooden box in which to bury his son. He is afraid that his son's flesh will be thrown into a mass grave with no marker, no distinction. Poor people don't possess much in this life, and for that very reason, certainty regarding their dead becomes a very big deal. This hooks me hard. I know personally how important a coffin can be. It's been over ten years now, since Lu and I lost our youngest daughter in a hot tub drowning accident, and we couldn't afford a coffin so I had to build one. You'd think such a project would be disconcerting, morbid, but it wasn't. It felt exactly right. Kin taking care of business, not handing it off to experts. At the time, it gave me something to think about, a project to focus upon, a meaningful task when I wasn't sure of finding any meaning anywhere anymore. So something in that father's voice resonated and I got a bit misty-eyed. As we pulled into the gas station on the way out of town, I tried to tell Lu about it (she'd been sleeping) and I couldn't. I broke down in sobs, choking and feeling stupid. No longer feeling emotionally disconnected from a distant part of the world, where mothers and fathers communicate the emotions to which any mammal can relate. So don't try and tell me there's no difference between information transmitted via the word and information transmitted through the image. I have empirical evidence to the contrary. So what is SOM, anyway? Subject Object Metaphysics. The idea that reality is all out there, and I'm in here, and there's an eternal gulf between the two. And what is tv? A way of presenting this reality for our viewing pleasure, objectified, controlled with a remote, and needing no intellectual mediation to get in the way of direct experience. Did you know that people burn more calories staring at a wall than watching tv? That's because thinking burns calories and staring hypnotically does not. Something's going on here, folks, of which you are not aware, and it's growing. Take Krimel, for instance. Take his reaction to my rejection of his worldview. It wasn't a gentlemanly differing of opinion. I really pissed him off. He called me, ignorant, stupid, an idiot - all disparagements which tell me nothing about my mind but lots about his. Why? Such a violent reaction usually indicates some sort of ego threat, a common enough reaction among social apes, but in this instance, especially fascinating to this dispassionate observer of fading Babylons, that more is going on here than meets the eye. The encapsulated and objectified reality has, to an extent, BECOME Krimel's reality, the only one he really believes in anymore. So large he can't even see it. He's not alone. This is the dominant paradigm of the culture. He is, as he points out, discriminating in his selection of objective reality- it's not Jerry Springer he's defending, or even a high quality HBO Western/Soap Opera like Deadwood. It's Nova, by God! If that's not a redundancy. And the one thing he doesn't get is how I could be critical. How can I stand back and sneer at the latest and greatest in academic cosmology? Well Krimel/Avatar-Case, now ya know. I'm sure Krimel is highly intelligent. But intelligence that blocks enlightenment isn't a help, it's an impediment. I didn't get that idea from a tv show, I got it from a book. It's called, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
