By Dean
elevision has become the central axis of our culture; whatever image or information we see in the box becomes real in a socio-political sense. What is not on television is not part of our social reality. Television has the power to validate, by inclusion, and the power to deny, by exclusion. If this power is given over to the powers of moneyed élites, we will be living in a culture of money and power.
Political power in a democracy depends on the awareness of the electorate. If that awareness depends on the power of money, we will never be free as a people; we will always be beholden to those commercial and corporate powers that control the content on television.
For this reason, if we do not rip out the root of corruption that has taken over our media, we will never be able to reach an independent democratic political system, we will go on as we have for the last 50 years, simply pulling the levers that the powers behind the tube have allowed us to see.
Television chooses not only the candidates, but sets the limits of the political debate. It is obvious that there are limits on what is allowed to be said on the air. Who controls those video editors who have our culture in their hands?
We are being served a video plate with a few choices, all of which are acceptable to the power élites. We foolishly believe that we are free to choose, but the choice has been made for us in advance. We can choose Republican or Democrat, but only those candidates that the media has selected for us by filtering out those who do not perform obeisance to their system of capitalist corruption.
Television has the power to slander in an instant, it can be misused to assassinate the character of whomever the powers choose to, by simply ridiculing him/her. If we allow ourselves to fall in the trap of this sophisticated mind set programming, we will never reach true political awareness. Only a people who are politically aware can be truly free, all others simply allow themselves to be used by the powers of money.
Sadly, those who are used and duped by this video matrix are the first to stand ready to fight for their dominant masters, convinced to the medulla that they are doing the “right thing”. If what is “right” depends on what one has been programmed to believe is right, then one has a problem, Mon Cherie!
Television is a medium, a platform for the dissemination of information and entertainment. It is neutral, as hardware, to it’s content. The hardware involved with the transmission and reception of video/audio is available from now onto the future, the content however, is software, and can change at our will, it is not a physical entity.
That is why we must focus on changing the content that is shown on television, by uniting our political will. We must never let television become a slave to the interests of money, because television is a pervasive and ubiquitous medium. It is the tool that can be used either to destroy a culture, as we are doing in the West, or to create and sustain a culture.
Television should educate; it should develop a culture towards higher awareness and knowledge. It must never be used to bring us down to the lowest common denominator, using the denigration of humanity as a form of entertainment. May our television be a reflection of 's culture of life and joy, not of Satan's culture of death and denigration.
Atlanta, GA
Thu, 05 Mar 2009