tv--As you might have guessed, I don't watch much television programming. I have so many movies and shows on DVD that I just create my own programming schedule as many people do. But with just an occasional-glance at the glass tit, I see plenty: tons-and-tons of gore, but allowable since it's some pig investigative show like CSI. For some reason, the public wants this shit, and I can tell all of you why.
The absence of real war footage from Iraq. During the Vietnam conflict, the public got pretty upset by the images of human beings on all sides of the war--no legs, no arms, body-parts everywhere, people screaming in agony, dead women and children everywhere, atrocities, guts spilling-out of trunk of a wounded G.I. (also screaming), and-on-and-on. Americans finally had to see what they were responsible for, what they allowed to happen. The war pigs learned their lessons (aka "learning the lessons of Vietnam"--don't let the public see the human toll).
But the public suspects the same thing is going on in Iraq today, and that it could be even worse with us torturing people, frequently to the point of death. That's messy, so the Pentagon and the media (on orders from the executive branch and the private sector) have made it impossible to cover the war in any logical or adequate sense. Instead, it's that fat, dead woman with her big fake tits, gaggles of missing white girls, O.J. fucking-up as usual, and tons of other pseudo-news that would have made a kiss-ass journo in the 1960s sick. Again, the public suspects the real picture is much worse.
This is why we have all these CSI-like shows with the autopsy scenes. The public has a psychological need to see these things, to know the reality, which is a good thing. Americans are willing to face the fallout of their rush to war after 9/11, and they want redemption. We all want to take responsibility for our actions and inactions. And so, that's it. You would never have seen such incredibly detailed depictions of the human body in extremis back when Jack Klugman had the show "Quincy," based on the famous L.A. coroner Thomas Noguchi. Of course, there are those eternal child sickos who actually get-off on viscera, but who cares what they think?
It was even unthinkable in the 1980s, with a gradual-shift during the 1990s after the broadcast of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The X-Files also contributed to the shift, while Clinton continued Bush I's "no-fly zone" over Iraq. And then came his bombing of their infrastructure that caused the deaths of 500,000 children--an entire generation of Iraqi children were murdered. The public understands more than you might think, even if it's not on a conscious level. There it is.
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