REAL EYES

REALIZE

REAL LIES

anónimo (2012). Gravado numa parede de Lisboa

June 2001: Reality-TV

I’ve managed to miss out on reality-TV until now. In spite of all the talk in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel, or, in America, about the fat, naked bastard Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn’t recognize Nick or Mel if I passed them in the street, or Richard if he were standing in front of me unclothed.

Ask me where the Big Brother house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American Survivor contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that’s because he got on the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?

The subject of reality-TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the ratings triumph of the big-money game shows like Millionaire. Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves; or ought to.

And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so idealistic thought of as our window on the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world’s rich otherness, when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself – these half-attractive half-persons – enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent, when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?

[…]

‘Famous’ and ‘rich’ are now the two most important concepts in Western society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of their appeal. To be famous and rich, it’s ok – it’s actually ‘good’ – to be devious. It’s ‘good’ to be exhibitionistic. It’s ‘good’ to be bad. And what dulls the moral edge is boredom. It’s impossible to maintain a sense of outrage about people being so trivially self-serving for so long.

Oh, the dullness! Here are people becoming famous for being asleep, for keeping a fire alight, for letting a fire go out, for videotaping their clichéd thoughts, for flashing their breasts, for lounging around, for quarrelling, for bitching, for being unpopular, and (this is too interesting to happen often) for kissing! Here, in short, are people becoming famous for doing nothing much at all, but doing it where everyone can see.

Add the contestants’ exhibitionism to the viewers’ voyeurism and you get a picture of a society sickly thrall to what Saul Bellow called ‘event glamour’. Such is the glamour of these banal but brilliantly spotlit events that anything resembling a real value – modesty, decency, intelligence, humour, selflessness, you can write your own list – is rendered redundant. In this inverted ethical universe, worse is better. The show presents ‘reality’ as a prize fight, and suggests that in life, as on TV, anything goes, and the more deliciously contemptible it is, the more we’ll like it. Winning isn’t everything, as Charlie Brown once said, but losing isn’t anything.

[…]

By the end of Orwell’s great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith has been brainwashed. ‘He loved Big Brother’. As, now, do we.

Salman Rushdie (2003). Step Across this Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. London: Vintage. pp. 378-380.

Páginas Paralelas:

Watch A Conversation with Salman Rushdie, hosted by Patty Satalia of the Penn State Public Broadcasting (Source: Google videos)

Dos perigos de as mulheres lerem demasiado

Elke Heidenreich

[…] se há uma coisa que os Estados unitários não toleram bem são cidadãos que lêem, Quem lê fica a reflectir, quem reflecte forma uma opinião, quem tem uma opinião pode dissidir, quem se torna dissidente passa a ser inimigo. É tão simples como isto.

«Está a ver por que razão os livros são odiados e temidos? Mostram o rosto da vida, com todos os seus poros. A mentalidade pequeno-burguesa, porém, quer rostos de cera, sem poros, sem cabelos, sem expressão.»

Trata-se de uma citação de um romance de ficção científica de Ray Bradbury, chamado Farenheit 451 e publicado em 1953, que mais tarde foi adaptado ao cinema por François Truffaut. O romance descreve um mundo em que os bombeiros já não apagam fogos, mas antes os ateiam. Fazem fogueiras de livros. Quem quer que possua livros ou os leia passa imediatamente a ser o inimigo público número um e, em determinadas circunstâncias, pode sem grandes delongas nem hesitações acabar também na fogueira. O comandante Beatty explica ao seu subordinado Guy Montag, sobre quem os livros exercem um secreto fascínio, o seguinte: «Um livro é uma arma carregada na casa ao lado. Queima-se. Tira-se a bala da arma. Abre-se uma brecha no espírito do homem.»

Elke Heidenreich (2005). Prefácio: Pequenas moscas! In Stefan Bollmann (2005). Mulheres que lêem são perigosas. p.13.

Páginas Paralelas:

Mulheres que lêem são perigosas é um dos livros no escaparate do Clube de Leitura da Biblioteca Municipal de Beja.

Noam Chomsky

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World

Interviews with David Barsamian

[David Barsamian) Your office here in a new building at MIT is opposite another new one that’s called the Center for Learning and Memory. One can only speculate as to what goes on there. But I’d like you to talk about memory and knowledge of history as a tool of resistance to propaganda.

[Noam Chomsky] It was well understood, long before George Orwell, that memory must be repressed. Not only memory but consciousness of what’s happening right in front of you must be repressed, because if the public comes to understand what’s being done in its name, it probably won’t permit it. That’s the main reason for propaganda. Otherwise there is no point in it. Why not just tell the truth? It’s easier to tell the truth than to lie. You don’t get caught. You don’t have to put any effort into it. But power systems never tell the truth, if they can get away with it, because they simply don’t trust the public.

On May 27, the New York Times ran an article about the interchanges between Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon that included one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever read. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent the transcripts from being released, but the courts permitted it. You read through them, and you find that at one point Nixon informed Kissinger that he wanted to launch a major assault on Cambodia under the pretense of airlifting supplies. He said, “I want them to hit everything.” And Kissinger transmitted the order to the Pentagon to carry out a “massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record.

Right at this moment, Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Yugoslavia, is on trial, and prosecutors are somewhat hampered because they can’t find direct orders linking Milošević to major atrocities on the ground in Bosnia. Suppose they found a statement from Milošević saying, “Hit everything. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” The trial would be over. Milošević would be sent away for multiple life sentences. But they can’t find any such document.

Was there any reaction to the Nixon-Kissinger transcripts? Did anybody notice it? Actually, I’ve brought this comment up in a number of talks, and I’ve noticed that people don’t’ seem to understand it. They might understand it the minute I say it, but not five minutes later, because it’s just too unacceptable. We cannot be people who openly and publicly call for genocide and then carry it out. That can’t be. So therefore it didn’t happen. And therefore it doesn’t even have to be wiped out of history, because it will never enter history.

David Barsamian (2006). Noam Chomsky – Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World. London: Penguin Books. pp. 99-101. First published in 2005.

Páginas Paralelas:

Chomsky.Info - The Noam Chomsky Website: bios, interviews, talks, letters, audio & video, and much more