It was Friday night, Buy Nothing Day. I had posted the link to the Adbusters campaign in the morning but by the afternoon, felt a mall itch, or at least a compulsion to visit a great MAC store in my neighborhood.

It was as if consumption has a culturally conditioned gravitational pull to it. I resisted my I-POD craving and ended up plunked down in the living room in which I do so little living these days.

The TV was on. I have Remote Controlitis, and a fidgety attention span after years of tube addiction.

I started out with that news God Brian Williams reporting on more horror in Iraq, Shites slaughtering Sunnis and other way around. He is intoning that Iraq MAY be on the verge of civil war.

Naturally there is no mention of the role of the US in all this other than our troops just can’t keep order and neither can the government we support there.

No mention of Iraqi claims, on all sides, that the presence of foreign troops fosters violence or that the US has played the ethnic card there from the first days of the invasion, demonizing Sunnis because they supported Saddam.

Once again in our news, there’s lots of footage but little background or context, and certainly no attention paid to causation and the US role.

Click.

On to Channel 5. It’s Geraldo, my old colleague from my 20/20 days, with his tabloid Foxified news report competing against the nets with a brew of feigned morality and sensationalism. He’s reporting about a new dance that delights teens and outrages adults—“Freakin…”

Its sexualized gymnastics with lots of body contact inspired by those MTV music videos that have been bumping and grinding for years.

Geraldo tell us with a wink that it so obscene that he can’t really show it, and then does with treated video to satisfy our vicarious interests.

The footage is part of a story about a High School principal in California who has banned dances until this outrage ends. And then they cut back to the footage for another tease.

Of course there is no critique of how the TV networks encourage and exploit the trend they deplore.

Click.

On to CSPAN. They are rerunning a discussion at Washington’s Spy Museum taped last January on the FBI and the Weather Underground. Fascinating.

A former FBI agent who chased the Weather Underground, and its bomber-in-chief Bill Ayres who they hunted, in a discussion moderated by a former CIA agent turned museum director.

What was fascinating was how they both mellowed and seemed to grudgingly admire each other’s candor.

Ayres said that the Weatherpeople and Head Feebee J. Edger Hoover shared the same fantasy, namely that the underground was dangerous force that could topple the government.

The discussion was relevant in that it touched on the lack of government accountability and illegal break-ins, something we know about in this age of officially sanctioned torture, warrantless warrants, and spying.

Several top FBI agents were later indicted and imprisoned for criminal behavior. One of them was Mark “two gun” Felt who has since been identified as both the man in charge of the FBI’s Gestapo and a probable Deep Throat, according to Bob Woodward.

The G-Man said with a smile than one irony was that when Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt, he probably did not know that his leaks led to Richard Nixon’s downfall.

Bill used the occasion to attack the Iraq War with the same kind of passion he had for the one in Vietnam which outraged him into bombing bathrooms in the Capitol.

Today he is more critical of violence and finds it amusing that environmental action groups like the Earth Liberation Front are officially seen as a bigger threat than Al Qaeda. Huh?

Click.

HBO was running an Entourage marathon with back to back reruns of the show that follows the adventures of an emerging Hollywood star and his rat pack as the navigate the money trench in Tinsel town with its carnivorous agents and back stabbers.

The star is Adrian Grenier playing Vince the pretty boy actor.

As it turns out, I knew him when he was just a boy, and good looking one then too. He was in a children’s theater company with my daughter Sarah on New York’s West Side and had been to my home and office years back.

It’s great to see him making it so big and tearing Hollywood jerks a new A-hole. I ran into him some years back when they were shooting at Sundance.

An army of production peons tried to block my saying hi, but I did get through the cordon around him and he, of course, remembered me and was very cordial.

Click.

Anderson Cooper had Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams were on doing some of the hysterical shtick they were performing the night before at the annual COMIC RELIEF.

This year it was helping Hurricane Katrina, a disaster enabled by our own government. Don’t get me started on that issue.

Now, the people of New Orleans have to depend on comedians to relieve that tragedy. Did you know that Williams briefly studied political science before going to Julliard? He was asked, given his last movie, if he ever wanted to be a politician. No, was his immediate response.

Click.

A Frontline rerun was on public television in New York. This week, the focus was on Americans living longer with the biggest growth in those over 85.

The beautifully crafted program, set mostly in hospitals and nursing homes, showed how unprepared is our society and most of us for the ageing process as we live longer.

The show hit home like a bullet because my dad, age 88, just received a very scary diagnosis last week. It’s been hard to think of anything else. At least I saw, we are not alone.

Frontline was followed by a relatively new series called AIR that profiles investigative reporters. This week, they followed a Washington Post team exposing procurement scandals at the Homeland Security Department.

It was good except it doesn’t show how many newspapers have downsized and dropped their investigative units. Its focus also seems to be only on mainstream reporters. I could be wrong and will watch again.

Click.

And then on to Charlie Rose with Nora Ephron. She’s talking about why men like John McCain. “It’s the torture thing.”

She says, referencing his treatment at the hands of the Vietnamese. Of course no one ever talks about how many civilians died because of the bombs dropped on Vietnam by the sometime “moderate” John who never saw the people he killed.

Funny also how the NY Times Sunday Magazine carries a piece by David Rieff spinning the lessons of Vietnam by arguing in part that all has worked out well because the US is now Vietnam’s #1 trading partner.

They are “reforming,” the Bushies say, so never mind the six million dead, the Agent Orange, our failure to provide reconstruction aid, the destroyed countryside and communities, the tens of thousands of brain damaged veterans on all sides.

Never mind. The lesson he offers: “a measure of hope.” Yikes!

Click. Back to HBO

Earlier on one channel, the cops on the Wire are busting poor young black kids in Baltimore. HBO claims this is the best police drama on TV.

It is well done but watching it made me sad since I worked in the East Baltimore ghetto in 1963 as a civil rights community organizer. It looks like very little has changed.

On another HBO Channel, Tom Hanks is liberating France in Saving Private Ryan.(He is also acting at the same time in BIG on the Fox Movie Channel.)

You will recall that the D Day movie opens with a 14 minute massacre as the Germans slaughter the Americans landing on Omaha Beach. It shows what war is like—the very reality we so rarely get on TV News.

It’s also hard to stomach. Oddly, Robin Williams had mentioned on CNN that General Eisenhower once said before the onslaught that he was responsible for D-Day, and that if it failed, he should be held accountable. That’s a sentiment we don’t hear too much these days, do we?

Click to other movies, none of which engaged me. Suddenly I noticed all the crappy movies I have been paying for years. HBO was also rerunning one of those sex clip shows from Europe that seemed fixated with penises, including one turned to gristle in an accident. Yuk.

CLICK. I had my fill.

One redeeming footnote: Saturday—the rerun of Henry Hampton's civil rights history series Eyes on the Prize on NY’s Channel. 13. Fabulous!

Suddenly I was transported back to Mississippi where I worked on voter registration back in the fall of ’64, and back into the Movement I had the honor of serving and the privilege of learning from.

It is a must see if you haven’t. It was accompanied by a marathon fundraising pitch saluting the series as if it is typical of what is on PBS today. It isn’t! Danny Schechter/News Dissector

tags: tv  banality  passive  consumers  propaganda  addiction  

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