Sunday, June 19, 2005

 

Frank Rich is my hero

Please comment on this editorial from New York Times:

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."

That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.

Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.

But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.

The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."




# posted by pansyjoan @ 10:30 PM 3 comments

Saturday, June 11, 2005

 

What did I forget?

THINGS I LIKE


Jazz
Dancing
Horse Racing
Sightseeing
Museums
Thrift-shopping
Mosaics
Pinball
Bowling
Crepes
Wine-tasting
Eggs Benedict
Pinochle
Scrabble
Massages
Yoga

THINGS I HATE
Stupid TV
Liars
Procrastination
# posted by pansyjoan @ 10:57 PM 2 comments

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

 

Thoughts on Memorial Day

My father served in WWII as a medic in Italy. He always said, "I was just a medic," and I took it at face value. He wasn't very medical, but we kids never went to the doctor or the hospital and got told there was nothing wrong. He was always the one to decide if we needed to be looked at. Six kids had lots of colds and sprains. I never really thought about war when I was a kid, even when watching "Combat" it was just about the cute guys. When the Viet Nam war reared it's ugly head into my little world, I just agreed with mom and dad that the hippies were ruining the country. It was an honor to serve your country, but thank God I was a girl. It wasn't until I watched the opening scenes of "Private Ryan" that I realized exactly what it was like to be "just a medic" and have to be the one to pick up the bloody bodies, or have to decide which ones were saveable. How many deaths did he witness? No wonder he never wanted to talk about what he did in the war. My family has never had a member killed in a war. Neither has my husband's family. Our fathers and uncles served in WWII, and returned home physically intact. My brothers got orders for Viet Nam, but ended up in Germany. We have been very lucky. None of our sons or nephews have joined the service, and we hope they never have to fight this war that is all about greed and power for the rich and powerful. God bless America.
# posted by pansyjoan @ 12:46 AM 4 comments

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