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nerves struggle in a nutritional desert
Sunday, June 1 2003
Just to see how the situation in Iraq is being covered on cable news, I tuned in MSNBC and Fox News several times today. For the most part they were still rehashing particulars of the tiresome Laci Peterson case, but when they weren't, the news from Iraq was unabashed propaganda, the kind any moron should be able to detect. For starters, the graphic superimposed on the MSNBC video feed read "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - the propagandistic name for America's mission to, as I recall, "rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction." Unlike Fox News, MSNBC did not feature a continuous animated graphic of a waving American flag. They only showed it whenever broadcasting news from Iraq - as if they were trying to tell us, "this news from Iraq is really just American propaganda." It's simply a matter of time before they start dubbing in mood music to help guide us as to what emotions we need to be feeling.
Beyond all these superficial trappings of propaganda was the news itself. It was, of all things, a horse race being held in Baghdad. Horses were shown running around a dusty track while an upbeat, light-hearted banter was exchanged between the anchor back at headquarters and the reporter in the field. The gist of this, we were led to conclude, was that "things are getting back to normal in Baghdad." In other words, we didn't screw up their nation too bad, and they're mostly happy to be able to get on with their lives. In the face of what is actually happening in Iraq, such coverage struck me as absurdly over-the-top: comic book propaganda, the kind disseminated by a villain in a James Bond movie. It would be hilarious if it weren't for the creepy fact that so many Americans actually find these broadcasts comforting. Such people don't want the news telling them Americans are the bad guys. Similarly, back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Pravda was sure to show the Russian people comforting video of life returning to normal in Kabul. In contrast to the America of today, the Soviets never had the resources to invade a bigger country once Afghanistan became quicksand. (Of course, America doesn't either, but people buying government bonds at today's low interest rates aren't yet hip to this reality.)
I had a router installation housecall today, so I had to go somewhere first to buy a router. When it comes to buying retail electronics, it's always about the lesser of evils - or the evil of lessers. Between Staples, Office Depot, and Best Buy, there really is no choice. I had a hankering for nasty foodcourt egg rolls, so I picked Best Buy, a place I normally boycott just because of their policy of staffing their stores with greeters. Those are the people who stand by the door and say "Hello sir, how are you today?" over and over all day long. I hate those people, or (more to the point), I hate what they do. I hate that things cost more at Best Buy because these people doing this hateful work are being paid a salary. The thing I hate most of all is that the greeters so clearly hate me because they hate their job. Is there any job as demeaning as having to say, "Hello sir, how are you today?" hundreds of times every day? I'd rather suck carbuncle-studded dick for a living.
It must not take much more than the passing of a drug test to land a job at Best Buy. While I was grilling one of the employees for the price of DIMM memory with and without the rebate (the latter number being more important), I overheard another asking a colleague where the "Real Players" were stocked.
Back when I'd first moved up to Kingston from Brooklyn, I was amazed by the ugliness of the average person here. In Park Slope, it's impossible to walk anywhere without seeing the kind of human beauty that leaves you positively haunted. In Kingston, you can go a whole week before seeing someone you'd merely want to bone. While it's true that there are a great many more people in Park Slope than there are in Kingston, one can still find crowds here every bit as big as those one wades through on 7th Avenue. They're at the Hudson Valley Mall.
It's in these crowds that one realizes the vast demographic divide between those with the resources to live in Park Slope (or, for that matter, anywhere in New York City) and those who live in Kingston and spend their weekends at the mall. It isn't just that Hudson Valley Mall people are far more likely to be overweight or dressed in appalling "fashions" from some happy year in their distant past. It's more fundamental than that. For these people, gravity itself seems to be a much crueler force. The features of their faces droop prematurely and sway visibly as they stumble along, their muscles having become shaky and halting as early as their twenties. One can see evidence of starvation written permanently in their very bone structure. This isn't the kind of famine for which people get together and sing "We Are the World." It's a subtler form, the kind that comes when people depend exclusively on highly-processed foods. All the original nutrients are leeched away to make yuppy vitamin pills and then replaced with salt, sugars and fats. At age four a cheekbone cries out to grow to its DNA-coded specifications, but is forced to abandon the dream when all it is given to work with is "part of this nutritious breakfast." I can imagine that the legacy of this starvation is etched on every organ in their bodies. As I look at them, I feel I can see right through their anachronistic hairstyles and braincases right down to their cerebrums, where nerves struggle in a nutritional desert to lay down the wiring necessary for critical thinking. No wonder the Backstreet Boys were such a sensation.
My housecall went well today, but I found it oddly depressing to see yet again the computational heel under which most people struggle. Their computers are so clearly not their own - they have all this buggy adware installed in them, all of it conflicting with everything else while using up valuable CPU cycles, assaulting them with advertisements, and monitoring their every activity. The users have no idea how all this shit ended up on their computer - all they know is that their printer no longer works. One of the computers I looked at on today's housecall actually had its homepage set to a domain called something like www.incredibleoffers.com. I spread the news of Mozilla - a pop-up-free life out from under the heel of Microsoft - to everyone I meet, but today there just wasn't enough time.
This evening I watched the season finalé of Six Feet Under all by myself, although I think Mavis and Sally sat on either side of me for most of it. I recorded the show for Gretchen, since she was staying with Sarah the Korean in Brooklyn at the time, and Sarah, in addition to not actually being Korean, has no television. It was such an emotionally intense show that it actually made me cry, something I could have gotten away with, because no one with language skills was around to take note.
I also watched the opening show of the second season of The Wire. This season "The Wire" is something of a misnomer, because there doesn't appear to be a wiretap anymore. Most of the drug activity in the Baltimore projects is still going on, but now there's this new focus on shady things happening in and around Baltimore Harbor. The show was plenty hard to follow back when the plots and subplots focused exclusively on drug dealing in the projects, but now with its additional longshoreman, slacker whiteboy, and Baltimore Catholic dioceses subplots, it's nearly impossible. I must have eaten a Twinkie the day the necessary neurons were laying cable. I intend to focus my mind and struggle with the complexity. Still, for me the entertainment value of The Wire has never really been about understanding the grand story arcs - it's about the rich details of life in Baltimore's gritty underbelly. This episode, for example, had probably the most hilarious use of Garrison Keillor I have ever heard; his voice was cleverly deployed to illuminate one such detail.
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