Making fun of world leaders/politics

Posted on 2003-12-04 by ivo :: /politics :: link

(This is still just a lot of loose ends, I'm going to write followup articles to address some items in this article. Trying to write down all these thoughts is part of the process of understanding it, so the articles this section will probably remain chaotic for a while.)

Try doing a Google search on miserable failure. The first item you will see in the search results is the official biography of the American president George Bush. This is the result of a meme that's apparently been going on for a while; see this and this weblog entry. The key is to get as many sites as possible to include the following piece of text (note that I'm contributing to this meme by quoting it here):

“From this day forth, I will refer to George W. Bush as a Miserable Failure at least once a day. Why, you ask? Well, someone came up with this great idea to link George W. Bush and Miserable Failure in popular search engines. If you have a blog or web site, help raise the link between George W. Bush and the phrase ‘miserable failure’ by copying this link and placing somewhere on your site or blog.”

Thank you very much for your participation.

Satires and parodies on Bush, his behavior, his words, his administration, and more have been published ever since he got into the public eye, as documentaries, jokes in popular television shows, websites, cartoons, blog entries such as the one above. Even books are published which make fun of him. To me it seems like the amount of these satires have been increasing over the past two years, actually, ever since that tuesday in september 2001.

Lots of websites have arosen during the term of his presidency, trying to explain to the public how bad his administration is performing, how much the so called war on terrorism has cost the U.S. and other countries (a lot), and what is actually being accomplished in it (not much good).

I won't say that Bush is to blame for all bad things that are happening, but he's the most visible in the media. It's certainly not the first american president to be considered incapable; have a look at an old airings of shows like Saturday Night Live, you'll see jokes about how the president can't spell, that he's an idiot, and so on. Besides, the U.S. isn't the only country with an idiot for president. Idiots have been running this world for a very, very long time.

Plato's cave

There is a duality in the role of the news media. On one side they are capable of showing the masses what is going wrong in the world, on the other side they are obeying the official stream of information in everyday news broadcasts.

The first kind of news requires a lot of research, most information will be kept secret. This is usually done in background articles, documentaries, movies. It requires effort to get to this information, and only sometimes published as a truthful, well-formed, readily accessible piece.

The second kind of news is what big news corporations do all day round, they buy eachother's news items, mingle that into a low-level broadcast and fire it off into the masses, hoping that enough people will read/see/hear their version of the story.

This second kind of news is what causes people to be too much focused on what the media are telling them. It's like Plato's cave, we can't go out of the cave to see what the outside world really looks like, instead they are kept inside and have to rely on the information the media are giving them. The reality is too hard for us to grasp, too overwhelmingly wrong, too real. And only every once in a while some background or in-depth research is provided, but most people only seem to be interested in what's happening now, not what was happening twenty years ago.

With the uprising of the internet, where critical people from all over the world can comment on the world's major (and minor) events, this is slowly changing, with alternative news feeds such as Indymedia, Alternet gaining in popularity.

This numbness of the general public is also caused by (or maybe is causing) companies to put ever more effort in trying to sell products to the public, using increasing noisy, flash, brightly colored, annoying advertisements. The summit of all this must be the infomercial...

In the movie Blade Runner, Ridley Scott portraits a world full of commercials and advertisements. The big mass have grown so accustomed to this constant stream of big screaming bright colors they don't even notice.

Some people even seem to have forgotten there even is an outside world, and that it is indeed possible to go outside the cave they're in.

Revolution

All we can hope for now is some kind of revolution. The first step is to take anything you hear with a grain of salt. Distrust conventional mass media news broadcasts such as those on CNN. Go and look on the internet for alternate resources, IndyMedia may be a good place to start.

“There is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.”

Mao Ze Dung, "Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party", May 16, 1966

Let the destruction begin.