A thought on media-reality
Long, long time ago, Tom Veitch said that if you blew up the Empire State Building, it would not be the bricks falling down on 5th Avenue that were significant, but the images of bricks falling through the media that counted.
Still true, some 30 years later, even though, as the Bush-league should have learned by now with their endless loops of WTC atrocity meltdown images, most have a limited shelf-life until spoilage sets in. Their "Be afraid, keep being afraid" isn't working anymore, or, as the late great Lord Buckley said in the classic Jonah and the Whale, "Boy, you keep ringin' that bell, you gonna bend that bell."
There are exceptions. Some images can blow right past the jaded eyes of the media-eating public and burn themselves directly into the cortex, indelible, permanent. So it is with the public execution of the late co-founder/leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin -- even months after the fact, it's still right there, as bright as if it happened this morning.
He may have been a bad man. He may have ordered a lot of people killed. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if he had been Adolf Hitler’s spiritual advisor or if he ran the gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau that Karl Rove’s grandfather designed and built.
There's the image of an Apache attack helicopter firing a tank-killer Hellfire missile and blowing up a sweet-faced sixty-seven year old partially blind quadriplegic in a wheelchair. No one is ever going to feel good about being on the side of anyone who would do that.
Still true, some 30 years later, even though, as the Bush-league should have learned by now with their endless loops of WTC atrocity meltdown images, most have a limited shelf-life until spoilage sets in. Their "Be afraid, keep being afraid" isn't working anymore, or, as the late great Lord Buckley said in the classic Jonah and the Whale, "Boy, you keep ringin' that bell, you gonna bend that bell."
There are exceptions. Some images can blow right past the jaded eyes of the media-eating public and burn themselves directly into the cortex, indelible, permanent. So it is with the public execution of the late co-founder/leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin -- even months after the fact, it's still right there, as bright as if it happened this morning.
He may have been a bad man. He may have ordered a lot of people killed. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if he had been Adolf Hitler’s spiritual advisor or if he ran the gas chambers and ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau that Karl Rove’s grandfather designed and built.
There's the image of an Apache attack helicopter firing a tank-killer Hellfire missile and blowing up a sweet-faced sixty-seven year old partially blind quadriplegic in a wheelchair. No one is ever going to feel good about being on the side of anyone who would do that.
posted by Saintperle at
2:37 PM
