Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, or: how large media conglomerations threaten the public’s right to information, as exemplified by Murdoch’s Fox News.
Wal-mart: High Cost of Low Prices, or: the human cost at which Wal-mart offers its low prices.
Why We Fight (1, 2, 3, 4), or: an exploration of the motives behind the neo-Conservative obsession with endless warfare.
Have to weigh in on this one, I guess.
The shooting at Virginia Tech is tragic. 32 people dying is never, ever a good thing. I feel awful for all families affected. This morning, I ran into a blog post with a list of victims, and hundreds of comments from friends and family asking for information about loved ones. Since those comments were left, virtually all of those names have been added the list of dead. Truly, this was a despicable act.
Of course, though, the media latched onto the story and began exploiting it within a few hours. This should not be a massive news story. There is nothing to follow. Cho Seung-Hui is dead. All the damage that could be done is done. Leave the families alone. All that is left is for the big media outlets to find out and/or fabricate as much information about the killer to appease the dark apetites of the dumb American public. He was a very disturbed individual that truly needed help. End.
I would love to believe that the people in the news media are just that damn compassionate. But the pieces just don’t fit. Those stories of people dying in Iraq, BAH, no shock value anymore. Doesn’t sell. But REAL AMERICAN BLOOD! College kids, no less. That’s a story! And a depressed sociopath from Korea! Somebody should option this shit!
Also quite expectedly, countless people are already trying to politicize the massacre. For instance: this piece by Mike Hendricks in the Star. Look, I hate guns. I’ve never shot, or even touched one. I despise them. But guns are really not the issue. Certainly not the only one. If guns were outlawed completely in US, we would still probably have an astronomical murder rate. Would killing somebody be less convenient? Sure. But guns are very far from being the only means of doing so. I guess it helps people who don’t want to see a problem for what it is to objectify it by attributing it only to the concrete cause of the tragedy. I think if anybody spent more than a few minutes thinking about it, though, they would realize that there is a pervasive sickness eating the people of the United States from the inside out. Everything from its culture to its language to its value system has become diseased and repugnant. “Mental disorders” have spread exponentially over the last century. Every kid, it seems, has ADHD. Every adult suffers from anxiety and depression. Without a drastic change to the fundamentals of this country, in fifty years, it will be a fucking wasteland, and there will be a massacre every week.
Our morally empty, emotionally numb youth are mocking this tragedy. Look. We’re on our way.
Stop pointing fingers. The problem is not the existance of guns. The problem is the politicians. Yes, the problem is television. Yes, the problem is video game killing simulators. The problem is Christianity. The problem is the exploitative, immoral news media.
Our leaders murder hundreds a day — why can’t we?
Sayin’.
Found a good interview with Vonnegut while doing research for my College English research paper. Seems appropriate following the deflating address Bush gave last night. An excerpt:
My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
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