...has WORKED to a large degree. You just have to watch TV to know that. It is mesmerizing, brain altering and extremely propagandistic on behalf of the 1%. Any cohesive narrative--whether drama, comedy or news--is constantly fractured with commercials selling consumption as the only value, and worse, co-opting love, babies, children, motherhood, sex, sports, family, community, love of animals, and many other inherently good things in order to sell consumerism as the only value.
But the worst part is the fracturing of consciousness that occurs when EVERY narrative is broken up. People lose--and I think have lost, catastrophically--the ability to follow a coherent narrative to the end. Marshal McLuhan was right: the medium is the message. TV (as it is) = don't think, don't analyze, don't question, don't meditate, don't try to follow a logical path, don't go deep, but do be self-involved!
Many older voters tend to get their news from TV; most younger voters are turning to the internet because TV news is such a pile of horse manure. We see this divide in the current Democratic primaries.
The original drafters and promoters of the Fairness Doctrine, for the regulation of TV and radio, and including both liberals and people like Dwight Eisenhower (responsible Republicans) were scared to death of the potential power of the new media to destroy democracy and to unleash another Hitler (who was a clever user, and early exploiter, of mass media). That is why they hedged broadcast media around with all sorts of strong regulations to ensure no monopolies, fairness to all political views and public service requirements. One of their main tenets was that the broadcast airwaves belong to the PUBLIC, collectively, and MUST be used FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD. And one of the most destructive coups of the Reagan junta was the axing of the Fairness Doctrine, and that was made even worse by the Clintons' Telecommunications act.
However, I think that Americans are struggling to overcome this fracturing of their attention spans. Many know they are being brainwashed and lied to. But they are having trouble getting hold of a narrative of their own success at restoring democracy and their dignity as citizens of a once great democracy.
That's where Bernie Sanders has come in. He is fighting within this system of fractured consciousness to RESTORE our belief in ourselves as citizens and our ability to follow a rather complex and truthful analysis of our situation. It is just about the most difficult and most revolutionary thing anybody could be doing.
The system has and will continue to try to to kill the Sanders movement because it is about a coherent narrative from the past to the present, that is, CONTINUITY with the past: with the New Deal, with strong labor unions, with a strong middle class, with upward mobility of the poor, with strong environmental and food safety regulation, with strong regulation of corporations and heavy taxation of the rich for the common good.
Reagan, Bush I & II and the Clintons broke that continuity, and the Corporate Media reinforces that break in every way possible, including the most fundamental way: our ability to even know about it and think about it. We're supposed to forget who we were and what we had--an increasingly equitable society. We're supposed to think that that is impossible. We're supposed to believe, for instance, that strong labor unions kill productivity and prosperity, when the opposite is true. And we're NOT supposed to suspect the utter corruption of current labor union leaders in endorsing Hillary Clinton, without consulting their members.
The TV networks used to broadcast the entirety of our national political conventions, even unto platform fights in committees, as A PUBLIC SERVICE. When they started reducing that coverage and fragmenting it and selectively choosing what to show according to their own lights, I knew we were in trouble, though I didn't know how big the trouble was.
We can see the fracturing of consciousness that Corporate broadcasting has wrought with this question of Clinton supporters: 'Why do you support Hillary Clinton?'
They cannot answer it. They have no answer. They support her because the TV tells them to. They won't listen to a LONG list damning facts about Clinton's filthy donor list or her advisers (Kissinger and Kagan, for godssakes!). They don't care about the Clinton Crime bill or the Clinton Telecommunications act, or the Clinton mass incarceration of the black and the brown, or Glass-Steagall, or Clinton "Free Trade for the Rich," or Hillary's complicity in the fascist coup in Honduras, or her carrying out part of the Neocons' "Project for a New American Century" in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The women supporters can't even take in that Hillary has waffled on abortion rights! They just DON'T CARE. They CAN'T TAKE IT IN. They can't think BACK. They can't follow the narrative. The TV tells them that Hillary was "inevitable" and Hillary is now "the winner," and that's all they want to know.
Bill Curry is right to warn us, though at first I felt his analysis like a stab in the heart. He basically says that all we can hope for now is Sanders hitting the convention with around 40% of the delegates and having some influence on the platform and on events and speeches.
I don't share his pessimism about the immediate future. I think that we and Sanders CAN still win the nomination. We should not underestimate Sanders or ourselves. And Clinton's 300 delegate lead is not that great. (With all of her advantages, including all kinds of rigging in her favor, she should have done much better.) But I DO think it's wise to realize that this "impossible" campaign--which has done so amazingly well, against huge odds--has an uphill battle in the coming months. Our party has been hijacked by the Corporate Rulers and too many voters can't think past the latest news clip followed by commercials.
We need to double-down on educating voters, adding to the already huge "small donor" list, canvassing, phoning and all manner of campaigning. We can still win this--it is not out of reach--and we're building a movement for the future, to end Corporate Rule, and to restore our peoples' ability to think deeply and to think long term.
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