[cross-posted from ePluribusMedia]
I just had a most bizarre experience that I find illustrative of one of my favorite themes so I wanted to share it.
I've become fervent in belief that as a nation of consumers, we must understand the power that the at-every-instant unsought reconditioning of the perceptual commons holds for the direction of our country.
I'm an introspective kinda guy, who realized that one way to be an unhappy camper is how I did it as a kid, by thinking too much. Why's that important to Saturday's Paradox?
Well, I just understood this thing as, moments ago, I found myself responding to the NPR snippet that I encounter sometime during the blessed holyday of the weekend, every Saturday. It's that revisited moment when the turmoil of my gut bursts out the wrong end in the form,
I hate that lying piece of shit, I HATE Saturdays!
immediately on rebroadcast of whatever is the week's Sabbath-lie from this administration.
Perceptual commons...thinking too much, WTF?!
...jump
As I recoiled from the outburst, crystal clear it was made to me how viscerally deep broadcast messages strike.
How, sitting down to review a teenager's understanding of the particular broadcast stimulus just received, that thinking about it just CANNOT overcome the full gravity of something that embeds into the nervous system as directly channelled there by in this case, the audio signal, of a crook.
As liberal/progressive as it may be, I no longer believe that rationality and just thinking about it are enough countervailance to the thousand word-weight of a picture or sound.
One of the things I came to appreciate about NPR so many years ago was how fulfilling weekend reports of Scott Simon were made by that which leaked into my image non-verbally from the background of his audiotaped narrative. The power of NPR reporting in Saturday's Paradox proved once more that even thinking too much can't overcome the power of visual and audio image to directly emboss a message onto my nervous system.
Shortcircuiting the capacity to buffer reality through symbolic analysis, so stereotypical of lefty-intellectuals, is why we lose in the marketplace of ideas: cause we still think it's a war of words.
That's Saturday's Paradox, the battlefield is the American mind but the war's fought with sound and pictures, not the words of a book!
Really, how could anyone hate Saturdays?!?!