Frank Rich in tomorrow's NYT
nails it.
Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI."
I whole heartedly agree with Frank Rich. I found the continuous coverage of Terri Schiavo's slow demise excruciating. It felt to me like the country's media had developed a sick psychosis, a fixation on death.
And this is with all due respect to the Pope, his demise just continued this fixation.
To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. But at least one person found the events not to be wasted:
Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.
Deathotainment. Love it, Frank! L-o-v-e i-t !
Here's my theory: ever since 9/11, Americans have become emotional junkies. Mainstream media, in particular television and talk radio, have become adept at pushing the buttons that fire up the American psyche, easily eliciting the fear response or the anger/revulsion response. Terrorist threat: fear response. Thus the manipulation of the anger/revulsion response. This response was mixed with the fear response during last summer's Presidential campaign: simultaneous declarations by Bushco that Kerry was both a traitor and unable to defend the country accomplished the triggering of these responses. But the fear response eventually got worn out from overuse. Conveniently, the twin bogeymen of Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson filled the gap, soon to be followed by the whole Terri Schiavo thing. Sick, sick, sick. Do television executives believe that American are incapable of authentic emotion and thought, not subject to far distant events with no real relevance to their own lives? Or are people in this country so emotionally crippled that they can't feel things anymore unless it is supplied with modern graphics and spoon fed by the hair-dos?
Most disturbing, is the blend of religion to this manufacturing of emotion:
This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.
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This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a "persistent vegetative state" - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists ("devil's advocates," as they're referred to) and organ-seekers conspire to pull the plug. "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," says the show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a wealthy "religious fundamentalist." Her Julie Andrews affect notwithstanding, she is an extremist as far removed from the mainstream as Mel Gibson, whose own splinter Traditionalist Catholic sect split from Rome and disowned the reforms of Vatican II, not the least of which was the absolution of Jews for collective guilt in the death of Jesus.
Thank you Frank Rich, for voicing these opinions in such a widely read publication. I know that the cult of death will not be satisfied until they have their Rapture, but maybe some conservatives that are revolting from the cult of death within their party will come to their senses in 2006 <fingers crossed>.
And damn you NBC for broadcasting such irresponsible claptrap as that "Left Behind" rip-off. You're right up there with John Cornyn , Tom DeLay and all those other Stalinist loons advocating the greasing of the judiciary.