Let’s see now. I found myself unable to watch the first democratic debate. But this morning. I was able to watch SNL’s satire of that same debate. Indeed I relished it, laughed the whole way through. So . . . that means I was unable to watch politicians pretending to care (Bernie the exception), but I was able to watch actors pretending to be politicians who pretend to care? In other words, while the pretend real thing is too disgusting, the real pretend thing is not? Hmmm.
Meanwhile, though our loveable Bernie seems all too “real,” notice how his fury and disgust echoes Howard Beale in the movie Network? Yep. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Not saying that Bernie isn’t real, just that movies predict reality, in fact are often used to funnel reality in a certain direction. Just glance at current movie titles and summaries, and you know where “they” want us to go: towards chaos, mayhem, murder, genocide, bad ET takeover, end of world.
The copy precedes the original. Got that? So much for linear time going in one direction.
Oh, and by the way, we can change all that. We can change absolutely everything by peering over the edge of what they tell us is real and falling into the NOW.
The SNL “debate.”
The speech that got Howard Beale “fired.”
BTW: I seem to remember that recently there was a newscaster who got so mad at what he was supposed to say that he walked off the set. Just googled it. Found this one from Florida. But darn, can’t find the one I think I saw (a man standing in front what looked like a giant London government building), I think on the BBC. But then, as I recall, that one turned out to be a spoof . . . Oh, and here’s another one from the BBC, which isn’t?
So what’s real and what isn’t? As I said to my examiners during the grilling I endured to “earn” my Ph.D. in philosophy, “THE LINE BETWEEN FICTION AND FACT IS VERY THIN.” And that, my friends was over 40 years ago. Was I predicting? Noticing? Time-traveling? Who knows. Who cares.
Let’s play with reality as it morphs, rather than pretend to pin it (and ourselves) down. After all, as Heraclitus let us know way back before Socrates,
