Media
The old movie of the week was, “Broadcast News”
(1987), supposedly a romanticized exposé
of the corruption of genuine news reporting, by a shift of emphasis from the
subject matter, to the star anchor, from facts to facial attraction. Nothing new here: the news has ceased to be
the news for a long time now. What we
call news today is nothing more than a shill for some biased opinion or other,
a new spin for a pop oligarchian, a photo op for power brokers. Nothing really shocking or new here…. What is shocking is how meekly we accept it,
how blandly we receive it, as though our execution as sheep were to be
tolerated without resistance.
Decades before, the movie, “Citizen Kane” (1941), exposed the scandal of invented news in the
Hearst organization. That era pioneered
the idea that news was not about reporting facts and analyzing them; but rather
about dramatizing, sensationalizing, and stretching factlets and factoids to
make a marketable story. Truth no longer
mattered. Only selling newspapers
mattered. Any well-constructed lie could
form the basis of a good story.
Couple this sort
of reality with the abundance of old wives tales and urban legends, and a clever
speaker or writer can get anybody to believe anything as long as he/she looks
or sounds sincere, and repeats the lie long enough and loudly enough.
Francis Bacon
(1561-1626)[1] warned us. The Idols of the Tribe expresses the human propensity
for embellishing facts: we all do it, we all love it. The Idols of the Cave expresses the human propensity
to confound our own presuppositions with fact: as much as we may wish we are
not impartial observers. The Idols of
the Marketplace expresses the human delusion to believe that what we are
selling philosophically, others are buying in agreement. The Idols of the Theater supposes that the
face of the mask represents an accurate picture of what is behind the mask:
building on a commonly accepted false foundation, always yields a false
conclusion.[2]
In the five
stages of grief (DABDA):[3] denial, anger, bargaining (negotiation),
depression (recognition of reality, or defeat by reality), and acceptance (of
reality, engaging reality as a friend and willingness to change accordingly):
we learn about the wide variety of human responses to a single loss. Nowhere are such responses more visceral than
in worship. In spite of what the actual words
of worship explicitly say, responses may range from wildest joy to deepest somberness,
depending on the differing experiences of the worshipers. We can try to plumb the abyss of such
mysteries, becoming empathetic and understanding. We can try to support the way through such a confusing
labyrinth of pain and suffering, hoping to achieve Christian unity, in the love
of God in Christ and through the power of the Holy Ghost.
In America we
start a new denomination.
Reconciliation begins
with the confession that all of us are wrong.
All of us stumble on the Idols of the Mind, on grief, and on other all
too human errors.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon
[2] http://www.sirbacon.org/links/4idols.htm
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
[4] If
you have been blessed or helped by any of these meditations, please repost,
share, or use any of them as you wish.
No rights are reserved. They are
designed and intended for your free participation. They were freely received, and are freely
given. No other permission is required
for their use.
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