He hosted the Golden Globes awards show and let fly at all manner of targets. Either British awards shows are much edgier than ours (which is quite possible) or he had the kind of abandon that comes from not wanting to be invited to host again.
See also his final thank yous which likely sealed his fate.
You’ve gotta love Ricky Gervais.
A well-functioning oligarchic system usually operates smoothly and largely openly and without a hierarchical structure. It achieves its goals by setting up filters that weed out those who do not support its agenda and rarely requires overt intervention to achieve its goals.
I discussed earlier how the major filter was the high cost of entry in the modern media world that meant only rich people or organizations could create a big megaphone for their views. Only someone like Rupert Murdoch, for example, could create a new major network like Fox News. The high cost of entry came into being over a century ago and was a result of market forces and technological advances and the adoption of a business plan that depended largely on advertising for revenues.
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As someone who reads and writes a lot, I have got attuned to the rhythm of words. When someone uses a cliché, it is as jarring to me as a sudden wrong note in a piece of music.
I personally try to avoid clichés as much as possible and in trying to be alert to them, I started keeping a list of those that I hear that immediately trigger a negative response in me. Here is my list so far:
Speak truth to power
Last time I checked (when used in a sarcastic way)
Think outside the box
When the rubber meets the road
Hit the ground running
A perfect storm
Connect the dots
Light at the end of the tunnel
Start with a clean slate
Anyone else have phrases that grate on the ears (itself a phrase that is on the edge of entering clichedom) that they want to add to this list?
A new version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released on February 15, 2011 with all 219 instances of the n-word replaced by ‘slave’. The book also changes ‘injun’ to ‘Indian’. These changes were made in order to make it more acceptable for use in schools that have shied away from assigning this American classic to students because of fears that students and parents would find it offensive. Proponents of the change have argued that the book’s anti-racist message is largely unaffected by these changes and that what is lost by toning down the language this way is more than compensated for by having more people read this work.
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Although the problems with the media that I have described are largely structural, it is possible to identify particularly insidious influences that are epitomize its decline and Rupert Murdoch is the undoubted leader.
In this 1994 clip British television writer Dennis Potter describes how Murdoch played a large role is destroying the quality of British media, a process that he is continuing in the US.
(Thanks to Harry Kroto.)
There is a documentary of Manufacturing Consent (the book that I talked about in the previous post) that you can see online for free, although the image quality is not great. Although it is two hours and forty-five minutes long, it is entertaining and provides an excellent overview of the subject and of Chomsky.
To understand who constitutes the new national and transglobal oligarchies and how they work, it is helpful to examine a subsystem of the oligarchy that has been studied extensively and provides a good model or template for understanding it. One fact that quickly emerges is that the best propaganda systems are those that operate seemingly transparently.
Those countries that have tightly controlled state media have a much less effective propaganda system than countries like the US. Not only are people in those countries aware that the media is a propaganda organ, which makes them skeptical of what it says, there is always the danger that somebody in the media is going to blurt out things that contradict the party line.
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Arizona is a state that allows people to carry guns. Joe Zamudio carries one and was in a store when he heard the shooting and he came out with his gun to see if he could help. What happened then shows that when a gun carrier comes across a confused and fast-moving situations like the shootings last weekend, if they are not very careful they could make matters a lot worse, either by misjudging who is responsible for what and shooting the wrong person or being mistaken as the gunman by police.
This episode suggests that people who carry guns should get at least some of the kind of training that police officers get where you learn caution and never to fire at someone unless you are sure and get some experience in being put into chaotic situations.
As a follow up to the previous post, the great film O Lucky Man (1975) is the story of Mick Travis, a Candide-like character played by Malcolm McDowell, poor but ambitious, who wants to get ahead and is willing to do anything that he thinks capitalism requires of him but is manipulated by rich people who take advantage of his naivete to serve their own ends.
The film has a wonderfully cynical sound track by Alan Price, especially this song Look Over Your Shoulder.
If you didn’t follow it, the last verse goes:
Hope springs eternal in a young man’s breast
And he dreams of a better life ahead
Without that dream you are nothing, nothing, nothing
You’ve got to find out for yourself that dream is dead.