Thursday, March 27, 2003

America’s “China Syndrome” The original China Syndrome was a movie made about twenty years ago with Jane Fonda, about a TV crew that accidentally stumbles into a near melt-down in a California nuclear power plant.  In the movie, the cover up is revealed, and the nuclear melt-down doesn’t occur.    “China Syndrome” can also refer to the problem the Chinese government has with the Internet.  The basic problem is the Chinese government is committed to economic modernization that depends on the free flow of information through the network, but it is scared that the same information infrastructure can lead to subversive political thought.   I think America is experiencing its own China Syndrome with the media coverage of the war, and the desperate attempts of people to get information beyond the propaganda and misinformed analysis that passes for news on the cable channels and the networks.   Look at this compilation of stories that were breathlessly headlined, and which all proved to be untrue.    Here is the connection.  Our political and consumer culture relies heavily on corporate media to establish the way people are expected to think, buy and vote.  So, for example, the media has been heavily co-opted into the government’s terrorism alert scam, which uses fear to suppress questioning and political dissent.   But the result, exacerbated since Sept. 11th, is that Americans see the world one way, and almost the entire rest of the world sees things differently.  Instead of the unity of opinion, as existed shortly after the world trade center attacks, there is now a belief in most of the world that the U.S. is inflicting terrorism on a defenseless population.   This disconnect leads to really bad consequences.  First, it allows leaders (such as the Republican hawks like Ken “Cake Walk” Andleman, and Richard “on to Tehran” Pearle to sell their ideological wishes as if they were fact.  Secondly, if you look at the history of recent wars – like in Serbia, Rwanda  and Germany in World War II, the leaders and the population suffered under mass delusions and  often these delusions were fabricated by those in power for their own ends.   We have the makings of just such a mass delusion in America today, that can bog us down in a generations long war in the Middle East.  We are not “liberators” like we were in World War II.  We are a foreign power occupying and subjugating a distant country.   However, there exists an alternate world, populated by bloggers, by internet users who find foreign sources of news, unfiltered by U.S. corporate networks, and translation programs that will allow almost anything on the internet to be read in English.   In some cases, the bloggers are beating the news channels for timely and accurate information.  For example, the agonist has a website that continually updates war news that is better and more accurate than CNN.  Sean Paul Kelly has struck a nerve—and is being read by hundreds of thousands of people per day, rivaling the audience of some networks.   So the internet provides an alternate media, not under corporate control, which can provide a completely different outlook.    The problem is that at the present, the impact of these alternate news sources is confined to a very narrow slice of the U.S. population.  However, it has the potential to grow, and the part of the population tuned into this new channel also includes many of the elites.  They know the power of this free expression. For example, in the business world, giant U.S. Foodservice attempted to shut down a rumor web site to prevent its employees from posting their thoughts.   I can see two outcomes here:  one is that the influence of the independent media and analysis will grow, forcing the mainstream media to react by showing more of what is being reported on the Internet.  The second is to diverge into two societies, where your reality is defined by where you get your information.   If we are really to rid ourselves of this monstrous president, the worst in 70 years, in 2004, the independent media, the blogs, the internet will have to be the tip of the spear—forcing the corporate media to give ground and open up to cover the world’s reality, instead of America’s delusions.   5:32:03 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 4/2/2003; 11:23:16 PM.