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Commentary On FCC Function |
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by Tim Jones
Email: tjones_theonanda (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) |
10 Jun 2003
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Numbered list of comments concerning FCC function. Summaries of opinions generally formulating societal problems induced by poor legislation in regards to corporate mergers |
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1. The FCC hearing can’t see through the notion that the viewer has to block certain channels: the v-chip and other ideas. There is the ability of panderers to seduce viewers. The shifting of responsibility to viewers is like telling city dwellers that they must figure out for themselves which blocks are unsafe to travel down at night by actually traveling down them and being subjected to the experience. Rather it is more logical and ethical to have the default stations all be “clean” for any to watch. At the same time, if necessary, it should be possible for those who seek to be seduced, through an act of will, to travel down certain “taboo” blocks of the media city. They should have to consciously unblock stations as well as avenues: they need to buy a ticket to Nevada, so to speak. Currently the idea is that the public to be good has to withstand seductive advertising and programming and then attempt to block it. It is adding insult to injury more than enabling free choice. The TV, cable and otherwise, should not be a whorehouse you are legislatively forced to navigate through and then attempt to protect yourself from.
2. The FCC guidelines themselves expressly state a definition of obscene that is routinely violated. Statements about excrement, depictions of elimination, etc. are verbally expressed on cable stations. Showtime, a premier station, displays in a series featuring “Seymour Butts”, a pornographer, nude females discussing sex acts involving swallowing anally secreted semen following anal intercourse. Normally, in previous societies, such conceptions would be associated with torture via degradation. It is a dark credit to our culture that members of our society associate such conceptions with pleasure and some willingly perform for others, I guess for money, such things. Reality is not easy too swallow, but the truth shall set you up for the possibility of change. Showtime is a successful mainstream cable channel. The FCC regulations are extant. A violation has occurred. If you care to help cure such degeneracy you need to find out facts and you need to enforce the law. Pornography itself should not and I believe is not legally allowed to be electronically or otherwise ported across state lines. It is routinely so ported, albeit profitably.
3. Television and media in general will suffer without proper regulation.
a) I myself have chosen not to watch most TV because it is reaching such a level of degeneration.
b) In addition, by not instilling moral and spiritual capability in children and young people – society in general – the eventual victim will be society. It will suffer the consequences of degenerates who know or understand the implicit message of unregulated, predatory media: take advantage of situations that are not sufficiently regulated; exploit and deprive others at will when it is to your short term profit to do so. An irony occurs when a rock star chastises copyright violators using Napster about stealing their work. Their songs bred poor moral and spiritual capacity and instilled “my pleasure first, above all other concerns.” The circle has come full round.
c) Violence and other societal ills – drugs, etc. – to whatever degree they are instilled by television and other media will be redressed. This is an article of faith more than science. The potential price, if in reality TV caused the behaviors mentioned in two (not to mention binge drinking, disease, and other social problems) via the feed back loop described in my previous letter, could be something like a French Revolution. Citizens might attack media figures, buildings, and corporations. In essence the wrongs of the French Revolution, from one perspective, have been perfected: the new aristocracy breeds paupers and degenerates to be enslaved and available willingly via early mental conditioning: a box they purchase and carry into homes and watch incessantly willingly. But stitches are being sown, I suggest, imperceptibly (cf. Dickens “The Tale of Two Cities”); a potential energy of sorts is present whenever one party wrongs another and there are no legal or social redresses for the wrong.
d) I recently refused to upgrade to digital cable because I did not want to see the advertisements for pornographic channels on channel 17 and I do not think that I should have to fight the box to keep a sense of decency and self-respect in my own home. I am an unsuspecting trusting person by nature and am easily tricked. Like a child. Will someone like you help me? Or must we all be hard, untrusting, and suspicious? What kind of world is that? Everybody for themselves; no one for everyone. And what does a parent answer when the child learning to read asks about the programs scrolling across the screen on channel 17. No good parent should buy digital cable. Is that good for the industry? Temptation Island is put in every home – is that a good thing?
e) Additionally, as came out in the recent FCC hearing, conglomerates that merge different media are a mistake. The media is the message. When papers are owned by cable TV then the natural antagonism between these two media is lost and both suffer. I don’t believe the papers, the Internet, or the cable anymore. They are all the same: confused, manufactured for profit, pabulum. The corporations are seeking synergies not in the people’s best interest, but in their profits best interest. The irony is that their greed is destroying them: Time-Warner (AOL-Time-Warner covers magazines, movies, cable, and the Internet) is losing money and Fox News Network at least seems to be purely TV news and is making money.
This example tells why the wise should legislate wisely: the foolish destroy themselves foolishly without the disinterested wise establishing a sound infrastructure for them to operate and productively, positively compete in. In the long run what is good for the public is profitable and what is injurious will be destroyed. In short CNN can’t attack aspects of movies or the Internet because it is not in their best interest. The synergies gained are indicative of a desire to control the public and its perceptions of products, rather than to keep them well informed.
4. I ask you will a mother or father who has lost a son or daughter in a shooting such as Columbine be satisfied when you inform them that the perpetrator’s parents should have controlled their child better? Will that fill them with comfort? It is pure logic that in the equation bad parents + access to guns + violence inducing video games + a general toxic culture = Columbine that the input variables that are subject to legislative oversight are not parents. The parameters that are subject to legislative change (or at least influence) are the middle ones. If there are no guns accessible by children and there are no video games that train youngsters in violence then there is no Columbine possible. Children do not know how to shoot a gun instinctively; it is a trained skill and they don’t manufacture and distribute them. If you wish to reduce the possibility of a Columbine happening again, parental chastisement is not satisfactory. It is a shirking of duty. The implications of the equation should not be just unkind words directed towards the parent, but to action to solve the problem – society needs to look at itself and take action. You are just dodging my bulletins.
5. I ask you how is that the “adult population” requires such entertainments, as mentioned above, to make them happy? What does it mean scientifically other than we are in a cage of ever escalating sensory thrills and selfish attitudes that excludes the common good: it is the intensifying feedback loop I mentioned in my previous letter. Human kind needs to get above their animal, sensory-based instincts. Human culture needs to become dedicated to making good children. Someone needs to figure out how to make people not so much successful, wealthy, healthy, intelligent, talented, or professional as they need to figure out how to make people good. Good people are truly, regularly happy. The equations work out. But beware of blind, central authority and obedience to it! There is wisdom in keeping vice industries local: it limits their profitability and their global reach. Good government should favor and help the good; not help shadows tempt and cut spiritual and ethical hamstrings.
6. I will address the notion, mentioned in your letter, that the good averages out with the bad. That is that there are lots of good things offered by Time-Warner and other major corporations (the Internet, etc.) and so the good averages out with the bad. First some facts. Time-Warner secretively profits from pornography (see enclosed), casinos and traditional vice peddling and in theory it provides the public valuable information via stations such as CNN. They do not publish openly the profits from nefarious enterprises. Something you should force them to do. We’d like to know who is who and that is my central point here.
This is the general schizophrenia of our age created by foolish legislation that has allowed mergers between different media vehicles and other contorted combinations of single companies providing various products and services. Corporations now days are like genetically engineered grotesque animals: Disney World and Viagra and Beer all, in theory, can emanate from the same source whereas previously moral identification was the primary key to human, legislature, countries, and people. The Catholic Church, itself, is an extreme example: pedophiles and priests emanate from the same human frames and are protected uniformly by the institution. What such entities stand for and what they mean are not clearly decipherable by a regular human being. In turn the populace is becoming like the corporations: mixed bags of junk spiraling secretively downward, all the while thinking they have cleverly outfoxed God himself. Our current economy, vice industries, and Enron scandals come to mind. When you put your finger on the culprit, the culprit points to some redeeming aspect of himself and squeezes out. Clinton and Bush, as examples of everymen demonstrate this: lust and greed redeemed with social concern and continence, respectively. What do they stand for when all aspects of their personalities are presented? Is it clear?
7. Make good humans. A good human may have vices and travel down shady back alleys, be ashamed, right himself, and maintain in balance a spiritual, positive contribution to society. Each human by design is engaged in his or her own Jihad: spiritual struggle to withstand vices and be sincerely from the heart virtuous and hence free. This has been the norm sense Christ and Allah, and in a sense, since the dawn of consciousness. But if the shady streets are no longer termed shady, but are as shiny as righteous paths then the equation blurs: confusion ensues. When depraved paths are strengthened by science and technology, capital and talent and when a good hand washes and hides an evil hand return tickets to decency are lost: in time many remain severely compromised. That is the result of the legislation and legislative subservience to corporations given in item six. The ruling wise are compromised themselves and a downward spiral commences and begins accelerating: we are in the throws of it as I type this.
The stigma and ethos of our current society does not serve as helps for return tickets from flights into vice. Indeed at every turn – in the home on the TV, in the gym with piped in sexual rock songs, on billboards above the highways, in magazines, and many other places – traps of the toxic culture keep the overseers ideas and frames alive and well: sex sells, be full of vice (gluttony, pride, envy, greed, etc.), buy. Where is a beacon of true light in the jungle? Are we losing our freedom? Have we lost it?
Attacks against any of these elements is muted by ignorance of the source or, if the source be known, its redeeming products and services. ATT can’t be attacked because it is both the phone company and the pornographer (see enclosed). Indeed the US can’t be attacked because it is both a source of food for starving nations and depravity for advanced nations. It promotes and sells cigarettes, sex, and imports drugs. It is as if zoning laws of the mind have been wiped out in flash after thousands of years of careful cultural evolution. We need wisdom in cultural zoning: the ecology of human perceptions needs clarity of identity and alignments with perennial human equations. You need to start fixing the country.
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