[MD] Mediated Objectivism and me

[Mary]

Hello John,

Glad to hear you and Lu had a good time in Reno.  

I lived once for a year without a tv.  It was a shock to see it again.  Some
of it can be vulgar, such as when CNN spends 15 minutes showing you scenes
of horror from Haiti then breaks for a Sham Wow commercial.  My solution is
to record everything in advance, then fast-forward through the commercials.
I haven't actually watched a commercial all the way through in over a year. 

I too was moved by the debacle in Port Au Prince.  So much so that I made a
donation to the Red Cross International Relief Fund the next day.  My
company offers to match donations to charitable organizations, so my first
stop was the matching gifts web page they have.  What I learned is that it
is monumentally, convolutedly, difficult to get a donation matched.  There
are forms to fill out and _mail_ in.  What's wrong with the send button?
There are receipts to be copied, and you must be sure your donation is going
to an approved charity; but, they don't actually provide a list, saying only
that it must be an organization eligible to receive tax deductible
charitable donations.  After 30 minutes of trying to decipher all this I
just went to the Red Cross site, made my donation online, and saved off the
receipt.  I figure I can take care of the matching stuff later.  The company
says they only pay out matches once a quarter anyway, so there's no rush.
That's too bad, though, considering that the Haitians would probably like to
get a little help before the end of the physical quarter.

The next day, an email appeared in my work inbox.  The company was
announcing in bold letters that it was making a donation of $50,000 for
Haitian relief.  Everything about this email was designed to demonstrate
what a good guy the company is.  If email came with sound-effects, this one
would crow.  Later that night I got curious.  That $50,000 donation they
were so proud of worked out to be a smaller percentage of the company's
annual profits than my donation was to my annual income.  For me to make my
donation means that Kenny and I will be doing without a few luxury things
this month.  I don't believe the company will be doing without on account of
theirs.

Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of John Carl
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 12:02 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: [MD] Mediated Objectivism and me

See the bubble-headed bleached blonde
she comes on at five.
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.
It's interesting when people die; we love dirty laundry.

D. Henley

So I had a nice time in Reno with my wife.  I lost $30, which is about my
limit, saw a lot of interesting sights, fading Babylons being a fascination
of mine.  Watched tv,  saw lots of dead bodies - live!

Rhymes with "jive", not "give".

CNN Reporter:  "It's hard to sleep or rest, there are so many stories to
tell."

Translation:  We gotta get these cameras everywhere there are dead bodies
while we still have a chance to film them for our audience's edification and
viewing pleasure.

Lu and I were not horrified or saddened by the spectacle at all.  It was all
just objectified reality presented between commercials.  No real connection
or identification with tragedy on our parts, it seems so distant.  It IS so
distant.  Very soon a gallows-humour reaction sets in, looking for the
absurdity, maybe to avoid the humanity.

But on the way home, I listened to BBC Radio and a different reaction came.
 A female interviewer breaks down in sobs, a woman screams upon finding her
dead son in some rubble, the dad interviewed through a translator - he is
distraught because he is afraid he will not be able to find a wooden box in
which to bury his son.  He is afraid that his son's flesh will be thrown
into a mass grave with no marker, no distinction.  Poor people don't possess
much in this life, and for that very reason, certainty regarding their dead
becomes a very big deal.  This hooks me hard.  I know personally how
important a coffin can be.  It's been over ten years now, since Lu and I
lost our youngest daughter in a hot tub drowning accident, and we couldn't
afford a coffin so I had to build one.  You'd think such a project would be
disconcerting, morbid, but it wasn't.  It felt exactly right.  Kin taking
care of business, not handing it off to experts.  At the time, it gave me
something to think about, a project to focus upon, a meaningful task when I
wasn't sure of finding any meaning anywhere anymore.

So something in that father's voice resonated and I got a bit misty-eyed.
 As we pulled into the gas station on the way out of town, I tried to tell
Lu about it (she'd been sleeping) and I couldn't.  I broke down in sobs,
choking and feeling stupid.  No longer feeling emotionally disconnected from
a distant part of the world, where mothers and fathers communicate the
emotions to which any mammal can relate.

So don't try and tell me there's no difference between information
transmitted via the word and information transmitted through the image.

I have empirical evidence to the contrary.

So what is SOM, anyway?  Subject Object Metaphysics.  The idea that reality
is all out there, and I'm in here, and there's an eternal gulf between the
two.  And what is tv?  A way of presenting this reality for our viewing
pleasure, objectified, controlled with a remote, and needing no intellectual
mediation to get in the way of direct experience.  Did you know that people
burn more calories staring at a wall than watching tv?  That's because
thinking burns calories and staring hypnotically does not.

Something's going on here, folks, of which you are not aware, and it's
growing.

Take Krimel, for instance. Take his  reaction to my rejection of his
worldview.  It wasn't a gentlemanly differing of opinion.  I really pissed
him off.  He called me, ignorant, stupid, an idiot - all disparagements
which tell me nothing about my mind but lots about his.

Why?  Such a violent reaction usually indicates some sort of ego threat, a
common enough reaction among social apes, but in this instance, especially
fascinating to this dispassionate observer of fading Babylons, that more is
going on here than meets the eye.  The encapsulated and objectified reality
has, to an extent, BECOME Krimel's reality, the only one he really believes
in anymore. So large he can't even see it.

He's not alone.  This is the dominant paradigm of the culture.  He is, as he
points out, discriminating in his selection of objective reality- it's not
Jerry Springer he's defending, or even a high quality HBO Western/Soap Opera
like Deadwood.  It's Nova, by God!

If that's not a redundancy.

And the one thing he doesn't get is how I could be critical.  How can I
stand back and sneer at the latest and greatest in academic cosmology?

Well Krimel/Avatar-Case,  now ya know.

I'm sure Krimel is highly intelligent.  But intelligence that blocks
enlightenment isn't a help, it's an impediment.  I didn't get that idea from
a tv show, I got it from a book.  It's called, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance.
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