At 11:46 AM 09/09/2000 -0300, you wrote:
>Remember _Robocop_, I insist.
A good movie, portraying a science fictional world in which Detroit's
public services have been totally privatized. One of my favorite bits is
when the TV news show ("give us three minutes and we'll give you the
world") announces that a satellite fell out of orbit, hitting Santa
Barbara, CA, killing two former presidents. Symbolizing the superficiality
of the news reporting that we're seeing more and more these days, the names
of the former presidents aren't even mentioned (nor is the possibilities
that others died)! The US, at least, is going in the RoboCop direction, in
which everything is for sale and all the news is happy-talk propaganda.
It's likely that the poorer parts of the world are speeding down that path
faster. I know that poorer parts of the US are. (Néstor mentioned that
commercial pollution hits the poor and working-class neighborhoods more
than the rich. That's true here in Los Angeles, where billboards just
barely appear in Beverly Hills while they and other eyesores afflict almost
all of the rest of the greater LA area. Poorer areas need the advertising
because it pays taxes.)
The good news in RoboCop is that there's hope: another great scene has the
ultra-high-tech robot trying to fight RoboCop (the good guy), almost
winning, chasing our hero into the stair-well, where it turns out that the
high-tech machine can't go down stairs!
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
