Recently National Public Radio did a piece about the working conditions at the factories in China that make components and assemble iPhones, iPads and iPods. The original piece was based on a monologist named Mike Daisey who claimed that he had gone to China, masqueraded as a businessman and gained access to several of the factories (he first claimed he went to ten factories and later said that he'd visited five his translator says that he visited three). In his monologue (which is the lazy man's Chautauqua talk -- all opinion of feelings dressed up as "facts"), Mr. Daisey made claims about the treatment of the workers that made it appear that some Apple products were the result of slave and child labor under the same working conditions as prevailed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory before the fire. In other words, places that one wouldn't want one's worst enemy to work.
The result of Mr. Daisey's appearance on the original NPR program is that a hue and cry went out among the liberal and conservative users of said Apple products and a giant guilt trip among those who punch their e-mails while standing at the line at the local Whole Foods.
But then, someone tipped NPR off that Mr. Daisey's claims were not quite as truthful as originally portrayed. They did some investigation and found that there were many discrepancies between what Mr. Daisey claimed and what the translator and other investigators claimed. NPR confronted Mr. Daisey this past Saturday and he admitted that he had:
1.) Lied for the greater good.
2.) That he is not a journalist. He is an actor. Thus, he is not a liar. He is a dramatist.
Needless to say, NPR felt burned because it had been made suckers NPR admitted that it had not checked Mr. Daisey's claims as it should have. But it did not point out that one of the reasons that NPR did not fact-check as it should was because the network thought it had such a good story to slam Apple. NPR is, in its own way, as guilty as Mr. Daisey in spreading lies. But once a lie has been let loose it's hard to get back under control. It's like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of tweezers. Mr. Daisey spilled the bottle of mercury, NPR spread it around. Now NPR is running around with a pair of tweezers. Good luck. But the story has gone around the world several times.
Here's the NPR story on the retraction of the original story:
Retraction | This American Life
In somewhat the same vein, those in the entertainment culture like to claim that they are all about entertainment and have no influence on the greater culture. Other times it claims just the opposite. One the one hand movies, television and popular music, in their glorification of various forms of violence, cheap sex and drug use, are just entertainment. On the other hand the same media claim to use their influence to make people aware of bullying, breast cancer, apartheid and racism, and attempt to end those things.
Well, which is it? The entertainment media either have or do not have an influence on the cultural and the shifting of cultural norms. The answer is, both. Those who are unthinking sheep allow the media to define their behaviour. The thinking and grounded look beyond the nonsense of television and movies for their culture and look to the great thinkers of ages past for those verities that lead to the life well-lived.
But let us face the fact that most people are sheep who do not look to the Good Shepherd but instead look to the wolf in wool. And the results, since standards have fallen to those of Imperial Rome, have not been heartening. Storytelling has fallen to nagging and propaganda that is not for the good of the polis but for the acceptance and promotion of deviant behaviour and thought. Bill Sykes was not a bad man. He was an oppressed plebe who could not help but kill Nancy. Satan is just misunderstood. That type of nonsense.
A British writer has taken it upon himself to state the obvious and he hasn't gotten any joy for taking a stand:
Hollywood's cultural revolution is making gay marriage inevitable – Telegraph Blogs
When this writer was a young man back in the '70s there was a short-lived period when being homosexual was the thing to be. Most people do not remember it. A high school in Los Angeles was pretty much set aside for those student, male and female, who self-identified themselves as homosexual. Your faithful correspondent knew several young women who claimed that they were lesbians and the lovely Lady Nib was hit upon by another young woman with whom she had attended high school. Now, some good years later, almost all of those people are now parents or grandparents and they'd much rather that their former adventures in Sodom be erased from their memories. And, despite the fact that the fashion industry promotes a homophile image in its advertisements for clothing and scents, in a few years those who bought the lie will be denying that they were, for a period, homosexual. The boys will finally grow into men and the girls will grow into women. And it will happen when they hit forty years old and ask themselves, "What in the Hell have I done with my life besides shave my chest or let the hair on my legs grow out to a pelt?"
No comments:
Post a Comment