The news
is as manufactured a product
as an electric toothbrush and is
subject to the same market forces
and prevailing power system.
You do not make toothbrushes under capitalism
to stop people buying more of them.
in the same way, media product is presented
as desirable and necessary, more of it is nicer still.

Television, is controlled,
not by its viewers, but by a professional minority
who make the programs and commercials
to make money for an even smaller minority
and to shape the world to guarantee both minorities position within it.

Those most likely to dissent from this set-up are precisely those without resources to be heard.

–excerpt Test Card F, Television, Mythinformation and Social Control,
By anonymous, pub. 1994 p. 9

Did I somehow miss watching Chicago’s Channel 7 ABC late newscast last night?

I can hardly remember.  Could the foggy recall be due to the fact that the newscast is essentially unchanged evening to evening?  Clearly the question asked by the producer(s,) = “what video do we have to wrap a story around”…  Reporters are dispatched to stand in frigid conditions in front of a still smoking, burned out apartment, or with a anguished family in the background, a mother shuddering in grief over an “innocent” child cut down by random gun play.  Those same events could just as easily and more succinctly be reported by one of the anchors seated behind the studio news desk.  The video adds nothing to the facts.

The metastasis of violence and mayhem is reported night by night, with never a mention or speculation as to the cause of the underground economy of drug dealing and forcible theft…  Attempts at such interpretation of the state of things would make viewers uncomfortable.  Advertisers would not be pleased to have viewers discomfited prior to viewing a pitch for the purchase of a new GMC Truck..

There would be a chance, albeit small, that a viewer could draw a bright line between the mayhem that reigns on the Southside and the west of the city, the gun play, the trauma to ethnic neighborhoods, the deaths– to a society that valorizes an elitist, luxurious way-of-life.

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Do you have a tune, a lens-of-focus, that will clarify our journey today?  Indeed I do.  This one by Guns N’ Roses, Civil Wars, a treatment of social conditions using the analogy of civil war.  Capitalism entails competition.  Have we not been seduced to believe that competition is necessary and good?  “It is always difficult for people to accept the brutal proposition that competition means pitting Like against Like, but the fact remains that it is so.”  — Huw Welton, former Managing Director of BBC TV.

Civil War

By Guns N’ Roses

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate
Some men, you just can’t reach
So, you get what we had here, last week
Which is the way he wants it
Well, he gets it
And I don’t like it any more than you men

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before
Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
An’ the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
An’ all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands, time can’t deny
An’ are washed away by your genocide
An’ history hides the lies of our civil wars

D’you wear a black armband when they shot the man
Who said peace could last forever?
An’ in my first memories, they shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall in D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’ for their promised land

And I don’t need your civil war
It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor
Your power hungry, sellin’ soldiers in a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh? I don’t need your civil war
Ooh, no, no, no, no, no, no

Look at the shoes you’re filling
Look at the blood we’re spilling
Look at the world we’re killing
The way we’ve always done before
Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
An’ I don’t want to hear no more

My hands are tied
For all, I’ve seen has changed my mind
But still, the wars go on, as the years go by
With no love of God or human rights
An’ all these dreams are swept aside
By bloody hands of the hypnotized
Who carry the cross of homicide
And history bears the scars of our civil wars

We practice selective annihilation
Of mayors and government officials
For example, to create a vacuum
Then we fill that vacuum
As popular war advances
Peace is closer

I don’t need your civil war
It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor
Your power hungry, sellin’ soldiers in a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh? I don’t need your civil war
No no no no no no no no no no no no
I don’t need your civil war
I don’t need your civil war
Your power hungry, sellin’ soldiers in a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh? I don’t need your civil war
No no no no no no no no no no, no, no
I don’t need one more war
Ooh, I don’t need one more war
No no no, no whoa, no whoa

What’s so civil ’bout war anyway?