We have two perspectives. One comes from the media since a camera is stationed along
every visceral latitude known today. We get to see the bombs drop and the people wail in the streets. Had the Roman citizens been able to witness what was happening along the periphery
of the Mediterranean Sea, would they have had different thoughts about Rome? Perhaps. Perhaps
it would have proven to be greater entertainment than the gladiator games. We won't jump
to the conclusion that a people who witnesses, through mass media, massive death will ipso facto, become corrupt. That would initiate a terrible pessimism we can't bear at this stage of things.
On the other hand we have history. And history is a kind of TV with a fairly large camera, as large as a good and generous mind. The camera is an inhuman thing that is meaningless in and of itself. The mind is the difference between peace and war; between barbarism and culture.
And many times it is razor-thin.
The camera in our day has made things slow and dense since it utterly absorbs the
mind blinking uncritically before it and presents a thousand conundrums that wouldn't be
there otherwise. Text belongs to a man or woman of the world who knows a few things. The camera
belongs to the Manchurian Candidate type of brain-wash so valuable in a market-driven political economy such as this.
Posted February 19, 2004
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David Eide
eide491@earthlink.net
copyright 2003
March 27, 2003