• This photo from Occupy Wall Street still says more than a thousand words about how the media portrays — and how the wider public and whiter public chooses to pretend to perceive — protests seeking greater justice.
I say “chooses to pretend to perceive” there because those choices and pretense are always a factor, and never a wholly unconscious factor. Yes, corporate media will crouch down to offer a skewed perspective — making a single trash can and a tiny flame appear gigantic and obscuring the view of everything else around it. Look, see? Property destruction! New York is in flames! etc.
But this skewed perspective isn’t a form of deception, it’s an invitation to play along. And they want to play along so they choose to play along. Because it’s reassuring or flattering or simplifying in a reassuring and flattering way.
But they’re not fully deceived any more than the “I’m crushing your head!” guy from The Kids in the Hall was able to fully convince himself that he was really crushing people’s heads.
• Here are two news items from early American and colonial times that are also actually two news items from just last week:
- Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 10th U.S. president, dies at 96
- The Hudson’s Bay Company is closing down
I just turned 57, but those stories make me feel oddly young.
• Speaking of ancient news, here’s a story from 2013 about a major story from 2011: “How America’s harshest immigration law failed.”
Alabama tried to kick out its undocumented immigrants with the harshest law in the country. Two year’s later, the law’s in ruins and the immigrants remain.
This was Alabama’s infamous, disastrous “papers, please” law, which led to unharvested and untended crops rotting in the fields, put pastors and Sunday school teachers at risk of arrest, and threatened to bankrupt some local police departments. It was a nasty, cruel, destructive and self-destructive piece of legislation.
And it’s the model for the current president’s anti-immigration policies.
• The title for this post is the title of one of my favorite Brian Wilson songs. This parade-of-stars version for BBC Music is over the top, but it still gets at the layers-on-layers-on-layers aspect that makes me love the song:
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