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“Invasion of the Cyberpunks”

Leonard’s masterfully written attack on the notion that “TV violence, somehow simultaneously, both ‘desensitizes’ and ‘incites.’” In a way it’s both an apology (in the Socratic sense) of television and an indictment of the Bush (I) administration that ignored the plight of our cities while invading Iraq.

A great excerpt from the essay:

There’s this talking furniture in our living room, a twenty-four hour machine for grinding out novelty and distraction, news and laughs, high culture and group therapy, a place to celebrate, a place to mourn, a circus, a wishing well and a cure for loneliness. Before midnight, anthropology. After midnight, archeology. Commercials themselves are a crash course in economics: overproduction and forced consumption.

…and:

I had feared…that during the Gulf War our government and television perfected a kind of electronic grid to dazzle the eye and cloud the mind…Barbara Ehrnreich has said that when TV commercials want us to buy cars, the sell us adventure, and when they want us to buy beer, they sell us friendship. What was the war commercial really trying to get us to buy?

Here’s my “proof points”:

1.     Novelty – Flight of the Conchords

2.     Distraction – Access Hollywood

3.     High Culture – Brideshead Revisited

4.     Group Therapy – Baseball

5.     Celebrate – Yankees Baseball

6.     Mourn – the “In Memoriam” reel on the Oscars

7.     Circus – election night coverage

8.     Wishing Well – Anything on HGTV

9.     Cure for Loneliness – Cooking Shows

10.  Anthropology – The Wire

11.  Archeology – Nick at Nite

About the coverage of the Rodney King riots, Leonard writes:

Who says violence never changed anything? Had anyone ever seem so many black faces all of a sudden on all of the TV news shows? Where did they find these people, that they couldn’t have found them before L.A. went up in flames?

Also, his very clever analogy to cyberpunk literature (e.g. The Matrix) in the penultimate paragraph is a must read.

New word: Golgotha = an occasion (or place) or great suffering

New learning: Good quote, “Without work, this is no bread, and without bread there is no Torah, and thus no love of learning,” based on the passage in the Mishna, Pirke Avot 3:17: “Without bread [literally “flour”], there is no Torah; without Torah there is no bread.”…affirming the importance of both spiritual and physical sustenance in Jewish life. Pirke Avot, literally “Chapters of Our Fathers,” is a section of the Mishna, one of the most fundamental works of the Jewish Oral Law (the "Oral Torah").