Lazy thots on the trustworthiness of our news

[A note on the title: I am a United Statesian; so, when I say "our", I mean "Paradise's".]

Obligatory image:

Here is the next photo from my book Nine Zillion Drawing Prompts. (I shared the last one on January 21, in case you’re bored.) The prompt for this current pic was "Mutant".

Hmm…

I think I'm paying attention to the world. But am I truly paying attention to the world? I can speak only for my attention: yes, it is genuinely being paid out. But whether what I'm attending is really the world – that is debatable. Obviously when I watch clips of motion pictures that claim to represent "what's going on in France right now" or "the current situation in Venezuela", I'm watching at least a fragment of the world. But who framed this fragment? and what was occurring beyond the frame? what remains uncaptured, and how important should we judge these unknowns to be? How do I know that when a news report offers me a "video of France" that the video is not of some other place entirely? (A locale with similar topography might masquerade as France; for instance, Antarctica.) There's always an element of trust involved in news-watching. I guess, after all, I'm asking the same question that cynics ask about the lunar Christ-birth: How do we know that history did not occur?

Maybe there's only one region in spacetime—Minnesota, where I've "lived" my whole "life"—thus all films of all other places were simply fabricated in studios, or enacted by movie crews down the block. Maybe Hollywood is actually northern Burnsville. If I only were to breach, just once, the ten-mile radius of my comfort zone, beyond which I've never dared to venture, I might meet all the geniuses that dream up the rest of the globe.

(It's a flat plain grid, not a globe; I agree, but bear with me.)

Now that I've gone this far in my thot, I realize that there's a popular movie, a fictional feature, which portrays a similar situation, where a man thinks his world is real but it's actually being "produced" by a team of audiovisual experts. Or something like that. I've screened this film, but it didn't strike me as excellent enough to mention by name in a blog. Blog entries are crucial artifacts—they are the only way that the future will know what we 21st-century clowns were failing to juggle. So if you mention the name of a book or rap album or film, it's like preserving an insect in amber. The scientists of futurity will extract the item from its casing and siphon out the blueprint of its essence and create enlarged replicas of it, to populate the set of their latest Monster Movie. Cuz pretty soon the news-fabricators are going to exclaim in their eureka-voice: "Why limit ourselves to depicting for Minnesotans only our nightmares of foreign domains populated by men?—why not add some giant space-mutants for flavor!" So scientists enjoy job security, because the industry can never have enough previously extinct species to boost the validity of its news reports.

All these thots of propaganda deception and lying were on my mind because yesterday I saw images that I was told came from France and Venezuela, and they gave me quite a shock; so much that I instantly wanted to blab about their contents here on this blog post, to preserve the specimens; yet, just as I prepared to unleash my timid opinion, HOLY DOUBT like a mutant space-dove descended on my mind. So let me tell you about the visions that I saw, yet please understand that I live in the U.S., where The Unadulterated Truth has never been welcome.

I said the videos gave me a shock – but each shock's cause was opposite: In the case of the scenes from France, I was shocked by the violence; and in the case of Venezuela, I was shocked by the peace! Here in Heaven (A.K.A. Kubla Khan's Stately Pleasure Dome) not so much as a peep is allowed on our mainstream news about the French "yellow vests". I think that whoever owns our news agencies (one guy owns them all) would prefer if the common folk's protest would just go away. Fade silently into the great hereafter like a broken coffee-maker. So when I saw, in the moving pictures of "life in France this instant", heroic individuals wearing their yellow vests and doing battle with heavily militarized guards, I clutched my pearl necklace and audibly gasped.

Now, normally when you see protesters being abused by armed guards, all you can do is feel sorry for the victims, and your spirit sinks and you go back to work the next morning. But even tho I'm a 72-year-old grandmother, this scene of violence thrilled me a little: cuz the roles were reversed, and the same old boring tale was flipped on its head: you see, the state thugs were indeed attempting to harm the protesters, but in this case the protesters were almost retaliating:

One thug tripped on his own shoelace & tumbled downward like a tramp in a vaudeville act. Another thug got the carpet pulled out from under him (he'd been standing and lobbing gas grenades at the crowd from atop a red carpet), and he fell on his rump. Then a third thug was menacingly approaching a young female protester, however, lo, a second young female protester (perhaps the first protester's friend) tiptoed up behind the thug and tapped on his shoulder, thus causing the thug to turn around, & yet, when he looked, he could see nothing – no sign of the foe whose touch had contacted his armor – for the culprit had fled around back in the opposite direction and joined her friend in front; and now the thug, having turned too rapidly, lost his balance and fell down klutzily, while the two young female protesters pointed and laughed.

And then the motion pictures from Venezuela surprised me because here in the U.S. we're told by our mainstream news that Venezuela is a hell-scape where people are eating their own babies like mice do, without even napkins or silverware; so I was taken aback when the independent journalist announced to her viewers "You are about to see the video that I captured of some representative towns in Venezuela today: I would like to thank my cameraman for helping me shoot this footage," and then images appeared of calm streets with people dressed in slightly snazzy fashion checking their smartphones and entering storefronts.

Again, the main point of this essay that I'm composing right now is not to judge the accuracy of the images that I saw, or to make aspersions about the fellow who owns all the mainstream news; no, I'd rather philosophize about the limits of our perception, and brainstorm about the ways in which these limits necessitate trust. Or if you don't like the word trust then replace it with faith. I'm just the typist: the ideas come from who-knows-where, and then YOU interpret them: YOU, the reader – YOU get the last word.

So even tho science endeavors to deal only with that which can be proven experientially, still, unless we spend every waking moment repeating double-blind studies, the results of any given observation, however scientific, always require a smidgen of trust; not because of a limitation in science but due to the bounds of human perception. Therefore the news is like church. It needs us to believe in order to control us. And we're warned that, without the church, we'll descend into chaos: moral disorder: it'll be unthinkable. We cannot possibly live our lives ourselves; we must have some gang of priests steering us around by remote control. And if we dare to remain skeptical about the trustworthiness of our mainstream news...

I interrupt my own very important message to stress that what I'm trying to get at, with my criticism of our major corporate news services (ALL of them) is not quite what our current Prez means by his catchphrase "Fake News". Here, maybe it'll help if I tell you exactly where I agree AND disagree with Señor 45:

Where I agree with him is that there certainly is shoddy info being distributed by mainstream outlets; where I disagree with him is in the implication that his own preferred services are one bit better. Both he and whatever news networks or media he approves of are just as bad or worse than the ones he disparages: that's my proposal.

Now I'm half-bored with all this mumbo jumbo, and I'm frankly a little annoyed at how our Prez so often pulls me off track in my own diary. (How often do I get to pull HIM off track from HIS diary?) So let me fill the remaining lines on this piece of paper with freestyle-whimsical murmurs. I wanna jot down a bit of stupid old regular brain-clutter. Let our hypothesis be that my unconnected thots will balance out this post and thus it will not need to suffer thru the rest of its life lopsided:

Duchamp
(or: In praise of non-prolific production)

One thing I love about Marcel Duchamp is that he didn't continue to spawn billions of artworks after he left the major work of his midlife "definitively unfinished". He stopped for a while and focused all his artistic energy on his one last idea, which would prove major and posthumous: Étant donnés. This streamlined his oeuvre and made it easier to grasp. Then once one understands Duchamp's "brand of uniqueness" (for lack of a more respectful phrase) one can review—that is, view yet again—more relaxedly and thus with greater zest and pleasure, the works that he left us.

The Internet's effect upon my bookmaking

I think the Internet killed or made nearly impossible a certain type of textual interchange (reading-&-writing): it rendered instantly ancient a more sophisticated tradition; and that was the tradition that I was trying to become part of (perhaps failing but at least attempting earnestly): imaginative literature. So I wrapped up my books like one places a message in a bottle and said, "I hope you little texts meet somebody someday: now I throw you out in the ocean." That's all I can do. Now this blogging that I partake in is already way too involved for postliterate pictogrammers, but it's a different way to attempt to connect with the future; to provide future minds, which will perhaps be even less happy than the present melted specimens, a gradual ramp up to the old lost treasures. I think that we should all either BE our own Shakespeares or provide a ramp toward the actual living Shakespeares. (I leave that name plural and speak of its designees as extant, cuz I mean to indicate more than just William of The Globe, and more than just word-based imaginations.)

Speaking of the William Trinity, Blake and Wordsworth were also contemporaries; but Blake chose an archaic idiom and style, whereas Wordsworth (prodded by Coleridge) banked on a wholly NEW thing. It seems that Wordsworth won the future, because all modern poems are like flowers within his garden which are afforded existence ONLY on paying him fealty, whereas Blake is chronically misunderstood: the masses abandon any part of Blake that does not resemble simple new Wordsworth. (Think of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as opposed to Blake's brief epics Milton and Jerusalem, not to mention The Four Zoas.) I adore Wordsworth but favor Blake, and I favor my books (my "self-amusements") over plain prose journaling; however I'm trying to bootstrap myself up into my own version of Wordsworth by way of overblogging, in hopes of merging the fates of two of my heroes: that is, I yearn to mimic the best decision of Duchamp, while avoiding the saddest pitfall of poor Blake.

INCONCLUSION

All this chirping that I'm stuffing inside this 280-character sermon is just another way of pleading (to myself and you as well as whatever fallen angels are watching, plus my beloved followers at the N.S.A.) that I'm doing my best! I often wonder if I should put all my energy into a "Faust Part II" or some such work of cosmic proportions; but then I always come to the same thot, which convinces me utterly:

Our age is not an age of coherence but of flux and fragments. It's best if I stay true to my age and let my works be as glitchy and shattered and lost and confused as this time itself is. I think FORM requires stability. We're too unstable to have forms. The only form that remains is the isolated individual, that's why I trust that it's not a waste to contribute to a personal diary. Just capture your thots as they happen. We have many photographs of the visible parts of our selves and of our environment; it's odd how few photos of the MIND we have. And I think that unflattering photos are often as interesting as any other kind. Maybe aesthetic judgments require a stable "playing field" as well. It seems to me that, in order to have any meaning, moral judgments require a BEING to reflect upon them: a creature bound by a body. The same goes for judgments about perception, about art. That's why I don't listen to the people who say "this is how to write well" or "this is how to avoid writing poorly" – those rules only made sense and acquire their worth in a stable society. We're completely unstable (& unsustainable) so all rules get thrown out the window. A book is a type of form or rule. I believed in the book (and I continue to believe), so I contributed to its tradition; but now that I see our time as being almost book-proof, I must make my energies fit into tweets, blogs, status updates and bar codes.