Hell yes, step up motherfuckers, step up. Step up to where, to what, you say? No idea. No one has a clue what to fight for it seems to me, other than their immediate circle of interest (family, friends, Scunthorpe FC). Now, I’m not counting the people who spend all their evenings watching ITV, worrying about Super Volcanoes, getting raped by hood wearing paedophiles and wanking off over the creases in Carol Vordreman’s latest PVC cat suit whilst she convinces them they need to consolidate their debt. No, those people are too far gone. I would include myself in the focus free first category though, and just about all my friends.
I’ve been noticing it more and more lately and The Unholy Nag’s wicked post touches on a key explanation of our lack of direction. There’s a lot of energy around, a lot of people wanting to do something positive, to change things, to do whatever’s ‘right’, as they used to say. But what things are we to change? And what is ‘right’ when detached from the non-productive 60’s sentiment of whatever ‘feels good’? If we all carry on doing what feels good we are going to fuck the planet up once and for all quite soon, be it via global warming, a premature ice age, a nuclear war or some unforeseeable act of destruction from the other side of the red curtain. If you want to take into account what damage Daily Mail readers and celebrity culture are doing to the fabric of our society as well things definitely do look grim. Who gives a fuck that Jordan has three tits? Why doesn’t she just tuck the other one away somewhere, or donate it to a chicken nugget factory?. That’s my point though – there’s just too much information out there. Too much to consider. Has this paranoia been deliberately engineered to ensure apathy and/or confusion, to pacify people? Perhaps. I know that my response to the latest horror show in the news is often ‘oh well, fuck it, I can’t do anything about it anyway, there’s just too much going on’. Or is this flood of bad news simply a natural bi-product of having a genuinely free media? It would be a sad epitaph of men would it not, to have had the possibility of doing so much, but having drowned prematurely in the news of our own failures before we could get off the small rock we took our chances on.
Well that was a all a bit grim wasn’t it? I wrote it last night, apparently on a very rough Heroin comedown. Things should be better tonight though – Strictly Come Fisting is on the telly, and Scunthorpe play Cheltenham tomorrow. Viva las Bolo!
When I was about 14 I saw a documentary with my dad about a famous rock band. I’m not sure who it was, but let’s say for arguments sake that it was the Eagles. Anyway, they were saying that they’d put a lot of time into the whole save the world thing, only to find that despite having a good time, at the end of their earnest campaign, they had achieved pretty much nothing. Now, they said they had realised these ambitions were too big. They didn’t have the power to change the world. Instead they had realised they had the power to change the neighbourhood. That view is pretty much where I’m at. At least for now.
I’m of the view that this was originally the result of a free media, and that in the beginning (whenever that was) it was most likely to have been natural and well-intentioned. However, as with most things, the system is abused by people with agendas.
You can’t trust the media because you can’t trust the people who run it or the people who are made subjects of it. Our ‘freedom’ is heavily dependent on market forces. The people who control the media can only ‘report the news’ if it is financially viable to do so. In order to do that they have to keep you interested enough to buy a paper or to choose their channel’s news.
When you have large swathes of society desperate for their 5 minutes and a mass media constantly looking for the most interest grabbing people and events in order to survive, objectivity and integrity are the inevitable casualties.