So brisk and stiff and spry,
With springy step and jaunty plume
And a purposeful look in his eye,
In his little black blinking eye, he had.
I took him to the coop and introduced him
To my seventeen wide-eyed hens.
He tupped and he tupped as a hero tups
And he bowed from the waist to them all, and then
He upped and he tupped 'em all again, he did.
And then upon the peace of me ducks and me geese
He rudely did intrude.
With glazed eyes and open mouths
They bore it all with fortitude
And a little bit of gratitude, they did.
He jumped my giggling guinea fowl
And forced his attentions upon
My twenty hysterical turkeys and
A visiting migrant swan.
But the bantam thundered on, he did.
He ravished my fan-tailed pigeons and
Me lily-white columbines,
And while I was locking up the budgerigar
He jumped my parrot from behind;
She was sitting on me shoulder at the time.
And all of a sudden with a gasp and a gulp
He clapped his hands to his head,
Fell flat on his back with his toes in the air.
My bantam cock lay dead
And the vultures circled overhead, they did.
What a champion brute; what a noble cock;
What a way to live and to die.
I was digging him a grave to save his bones
From the hungry buzzards in the sky
When the bantam opened up a sly little eye.
He gave me a grin and a terrible wink,
The way that rapists do.
He said, "You see them big daft buggers up there?
They'll be down in a minute or two;
They'll be down in a minute or two"
Charlie Brooker. He wrote a review, very good he is, about the Horizon on last night. Isolation and sensory deprivation used to make people become suggestible. On one of his programmes he managed to convince Adam Curtis, of "Power of Nightmares" fame to make a short film about journalism. Journalism on the TV, he said, began as a wing of the establishment but after all that watergate stuff became deluded that it was a form of check and balance on the power of the government. After the fall of the left and the coming of the synthesis of political positions they became disillusioned and cynical, parroting the positions of power because it gave them something to believe in and also gave them access to the powerful in a PR-for-patronage deal. He's an intellectual sort of man like that, Curtis.
But another thing. Brooker must be a fan of Curtis for he used the aforementioned Power of Nightmares as an example of intelligent programming. He confronted some youths with various types of programming, finding that the only thing not to bore them all to the point of intollerance in the time he allowed them to view it was the Power of Nightmares.
These were normal youths, not some specially selected intellectually superior breed (although as most of the series is about the lies TV tells us in the name of production values, perhapsd my faith is misplaced). But I can believe it, knowing a number of supposedly stupid youths who aren't as ignorant or idiotic as we would be had to believe. I myself am illiterate in government statistics in that I never got an English GCSE.
8. Don’t make people think. Their days are hard enough as is. Bypass the need for opinion making by giving people ready-made opinions. Do it as though you don’t have a conscience – they are probably too stupid to make their own decisions anyway.
9. Ensure that there are no ongoing storylines with meaning or purpose beyond immediate sensory stimulation. Avoid universal themes as much as possible. Make absolutely certain there is no cultural, societal or global story or mythology present that conflicts with the myths of comfort and consumption.
10. Never encourage responsibility, or so much as suggest that humans could be involved in co-creating their future and the realities in which they reside.
Nim, nim, nim.
It's not just that other people become convinced that the youth is worthless through the machinations of the media, it's that the same effect is present in themselves. And the media, of course, gets to stick to the dross of Big Brother this and celebrity tits out that in stead of making decent stuff on the pretext that they're merely following the market, doing the regretfully necessary. In other words being "realistic". The same way the politicians act with their right-wing economic policies which always fail but are painted as being responsible, the only way things can be done. At least, in the overton window. But the reality they're so fond of claiming support from is quite different. The Power of Nightmares was the most popular BBC2 programme in a long while. But the agenda isn't really to attract viewers, nor to make public service (ie supposedly good but unpopular, really badly-made pseudo-intellectual and therefore unpopular) , but to drive people into idiocy.
That goal seems to be more or less impossible. You can make people believe they're thick but actually dumbing them down is a different matter.
For an original sinist I've got a surprising amount of faith in human nature, I know.
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