Stray Shot

This is interesting.  I got rid of the television and found that anything I want to watch is on the computer, without all the ads and by the segment I want to see.  Right now I am watching the coverage of hearings on Goldman Sachs and picking a guitar in a sort of absent way.  And because I’m watching this on my computer now it has moved into the background and my relationship to it has changed.  I can now watch the hearings and simultaneously write text on a shared screen.  You might ask how I’m writing this and picking a guitar at the same time.  I have my shoes off and am typing with my toes.

I am watching Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma.

This guy is like a hawk fluffing up in front of some chipmunks.   He has them nervous; the timing changed and the yuppie royal pacing went to hell.  I think it was when he told one kid, who was venturing into believing he’s as smart in front of these old men as in front of the man in the mirror,   to quit assuming they’re ignorant, and it hit home because it was already home.  It was a zen thing, where the arrow has already hit the mark congruent with the release.

Now it goes back to Levin.  It’s like tag team wrestling.  Levin has a really big head and he needs it for the brain.  Coburn slapped them around and now they have a different look about them.  It must be hard for these guys to get millions in bonuses and not think they are actually smarter than people who make a half million.  I remember watching the Watergate hearings, and there was no theater on Broadway with a more entertaining lead and supporting cast.

Levin is like the king who is visiting his gold.  He is rich in evidence that these guys were taking care of the company and not their customers.  The idea is to make money, not to have any particular ethical relationship with the society or even the American economy.  It is all about the firm, and these guys are  in a corporation so large it has its own culture.  Watching these hearings is like going on a  safari through corporate culture.   I remember when they released the tapes of the Enron traders celebrating the cornering of the utilities market.   The first step is always hiring some ex cops and paying off the ones on the beat, whether it’s the neighborhood or the nation.

Tourre is getting his ass kicked.  He was in the structured products division.  In a way I empathize with him because he feels that if he can give more context it won’t sound so bad as it does the way Levin presents it.  I suppose that’s like kids trying to explain things at the door of the woodshed.

This is interesting, to have the television on the screen with the word processor.  I can tune in and out of it because anybody with a computer and internet can do the same thing I’m doing, and pull them up on the network website.  I’m watching them on MSNBC.  Sometime before I go to bed I’ll go to Comedy Central and watch Stewart and Colbert.  I not only don’t miss having television separated off from the computer, I’m wondering why I didn’t see the central issue sooner.   No matter how many channels or how big and pretty the picture it renders the viewer passive.

Move the television back into the computer and it is just one more program running.  That works the way I watch it anyway because mostly I am interested in things like these hearings, which I can monitor while doing something else simultaneously, like this … writing at the same time on a page beside the picture.  Colburn is working one of these guys over again.  He’s the bad cop.  When he’s smacked them a couple of times it passes back to Levin.  Good cop.  And very smart cop.

What I like about this is watching really good lawyers … actually I think Coburn is a doctor so I should say, interrogators … work without resorting to torture.  They don’t need it.   Sam Ervin was 76 when he chaired the Watergate hearings, and he took Nixon’s boys to the woodshed.  He was the patriarch, like Walter Brennan,  and James Baker was Luke.  Peppino?  That was Lindsey Graham.  There was not a Hatfield left standing.

Got to go to In N Out Burger now.

Wherein we get to drive 100 mph with a textile designer, his Chinese wife, and a designer of containment rituals.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:30 — 3.0MB)

FOX news produces pro or anti-government propaganda and protests (depending on who is in power) the way William Randolph Hearst produced the Spanish American war. When artist Frederick Remington famously wired Hearst, by whom he had been employed to go cover war breaking out in Cuba, that there was no war, he received the reply:  “You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.”

And he did furnish the war.  By starting out with a desired result and then finding evidence to make it happen, Hearst became a master of yellow journalism as well as a connoisseur of rosebud.   In a state of emotional turmoil, people tend to just fall in line behind a leader until the threat subsides.  It’s dangerous to even question motives or the rightness of what the leader is doing when the public is emotionally aroused.   It’s a mob mentality, like at Ox Bow.

The  Mexican American War was started deliberately when Polk sent  American troops into Mexican territory to ride around until they were attacked as foreign troops, which they were.  The news was put out that they were attacked on American soil without provocation, which provided an excuse for expanding American territory in line with the newly minted theory of Manifest Destiny.

The methods of shaping  public policy through yellow journalism and by creating news and then reporting on it  is well known, but it was corrected to some extent through the Fairness Doctrine, which was instituted in 1949, but abolished by the FCC in 1987, the year after FOX Broadcasting Company was launched.   The destruction of any regulation of broadcasting under Reagan appointee Mark Fowler had similar results to the destruction of regulation of the financial industry.  It took the referees out of the game.

Because a major U.S. news network was now under foreign ownership (Newscorp) it was investigated in 1995 by the FCC as against American law,  but the commission ruled that Murdoch’s ownership was in America’s best interest. Keep in mind that these were public airwaves leased out with a requirement of providing news in the public interest, not for broadcasters to use as a profit stream.   The following year, Fox News Channel, the 24 hour cable news channel, was launched.  Newscorp later bought Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Newscorp executives can now drive  political  debate in a manner reminiscent of when Dick Cheney planted a story in the Times which he then used as a source on the Sunday morning talk shows.

FOX is not gathering the facts and from them distilling a fair and balanced analysis. The Fair and Balanced slogan is classically Orwellian. FOX is beginning with an ideological position,   and then gathering evidence which supports it.  Or,  it is instigating a riot, and then covering it as news.   And behind it there is an old man who, like Hearst, can furnish the war, be it foreign or domestic.