Mediacologyputting the ‘eco’ into media ecology (and other tangential meditations)

Image source LAFFOLEY ARCHIVE.

Sicko finally came to Italy. There must be some strange pleasure in reviewing and inspecting the sickness that has emerged in the American social system. My Italian partner tells me that since WWII Italians have always looked up to the United States as the future, a kind of Utopia to works towards. This might explain Berlusconi’s misadventure in Iraq. With the Italians gone from Mesopotamia, Roman theaters now feature documentaries about Guantanamo Bay, the US healthcare system and the docudrama Death of a President get equal play with horror and action films. Is there still an American Utopia out there? The Simpsons Movie opens this weekend.
Sicko of course left me feeling disgusted. In Italy, as a legal resident I’m entitled to a doctor and free healthcare. The system here is not as perfect as those shown in Sicko, such as France, England, Canada and Cuba. During the pregnancy a few times we had to go to expensive private hospitals because the equipment we needed for tests had too long of a cue at the public hospital. But still, disregarding what we paid for tests, the cost of our daughter’s birth was 100 Euros. I asked people in the US what the typical cost of a hospital birth is, and I was told around $8,000.

Like many of the tales in Sicko, I have my own healthcare nightmare, and despite having insurance, I have spent at least $20,000 in the past seven years because of health issues that resulted from environmental toxins. One thing that people should pay attention to in Michael Moore’s documentary is that societies that invest more into healthcare and prevention have healthier people who live longer and therefore cost less to the system (duh!). Is American capitalism so attached to greed and selfishness that it is not even willing to invest in a prolonged and healthier life? It is a sad irony of the Protestant work ethic that the glory of material wealth is really meaningless when you are sick and dying.

Technorati Tags: Sicko, Zeitgeist

I’m surprised that Sicko didn’t touch upon the healthcare of Iraq war veterans, although the film did hint at misallocated resources when it showed that inmates at Guantanamo get better healthcare than the volunteer rescue workers from Ground Zero. There was a really moving movement when a firehouse in Cuba chose to honor the 9/11 workers who were there getting treated because they were unable to do so in the US. You could see the genuine care and respect between the people who are deemed enemies by stupid, self-serving politicians. There is no real polite way to describe what is happening, except to say that sometimes governments can be really fucked, and in the case of our current situation, that is precisely the case. It is truly painful to see the disintegration of my homeland. Truly.

Which brings me to the Internet documentary, Zeitgeist: The Movie. While seeing the buzz on the Internet I initially avoided watching it because normally conspiranoia films just make me anxious and fearful. This one is no exception. When I finished watching it I got so nervous, I thought that I would have to go into hiding to avoid being killed by the international banking cartel. I feel a little better now, but it took me a day to digest what I saw and feel safe enough to blog about it.

Here are some general observations. As many of have commented, Zeitgeist is most definitely a mash-up, DJ style take on some old tropes. Many of the graphics reminded me a bit of rave video wallpaper. I think the filmmaker actually did an interesting job of combining ambient imagery (in some cases just a black screen) with sound. The deployment of comedian monologs as voiceovers is quite brilliant. We always defer to scholars as the experts, but why not court jesters? They have no institutional bias so they can cut right to the truth. The inclusion of the posthumous words of Bill Hicks was particularly poignant.

The deconstruction of fear as a control tactic was also quite good. There’s a fantastic montage of the utterance of “terror” playing like war drums. There’s also an interesting take on the intentional chaos of the Iraq invasion, which was designed to foment civil war in order to divide and conquer. In some ways you could see this as a means to also justify the continuance of war with Iran. I don’t have qualms with this treatment of the subject. He is right on when he says wars are used to perpetuate the military economy and to justify the suppression of civil liberties. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Where the documentary loses me is with its entirely negative one-size-fits-all theory of world history, and its judgmental attitude towards the American people. The disrespectful and accusatory tone has a ring of self-righteousness that is no different than the people the film’s author attacks. He actually has created a very disempowering piece of media because he assumes that people are unable to creatively engage or respond to their environment.

The Wizard of Oz approach that there is a man behind the curtain presumes that we do not live in a world of complexity in which things feedback upon themselves. The truth from my point of view is that everything you do or say is like a boomerang. It may be spinning somewhere out in the space-time continuum, but I can assure you that it is flying back with great velocity. The illusion of infinite control will die like the Nazis because it has a gambling logic to it: we play to push the limits and we do not withhold anything until we lose completely. There is no discounting an inherently self-destructive nihilism that is the logic of war as a means of profit and social control.

Moreover, the film’s author is enamored with the myth of the independent thinker. As long as this caricature is armed with truth, then the nefarious plan of evil will be foiled. A group of autonomous thinkers controlling a group of autonomous subjects– as long as we think like that, than yes, I would say we deserve our impending doom. From my vantage, the control paradigm is failing all around us. We are in fact getting more connected. Consider how on the eve of the Iraq invasion ten million people protested on the same day around the world. When has that ever happened in the history of the world? I know it didn’t stop the war, but it signified that something exists in the wake of catastrophe that is very powerful, and very networked. We are moving towards transparency, not opacity. Yes, you may be viewed by a surveillance camera, but your cell phone is watching “them” too.

When the filmmaker declared that all the great activists of world history who promoted the idea of interdependence were assassinated, this ultimately is the most disempowering message: if you are an enlightened thinker, you will be killed. This is simply not true; although it is certain that some great teachers have been killed. But to claim they were done all by one vast, invisible force is to impose upon a complex reality a very simplistic pattern. I can tell you from direct experience that the government is run by people who are human and make mistakes, and at times, may I dare say, are actually incompetent. When I worked for the US Census in 1990, my goal was to see if the government could actually accurately count its citizens, a task that is fundamental for the government to function properly, for good and ill. I can say from direct experience that the count was wrong and fraudulent, not because of a conspiracy, but because people cannot, or do not want to, do their jobs correctly. People can be lazy, selfish, stupid, bored, or uncaring, even those who work in the government. How does one coordinate the a vast, global conspiracy with demoralized service workers? You tell me.

Zeitgeist closes with the argument that what we need is love, not fear. I agree. But why did this entire artistic creation invoke negativity instead of love? I can assure you that after two hours of being pummeled with secrete control cabals that have designed a sophisticated system of mental slavery, one feels very little of the love needed to transcend the situation. This is where I feel Moor’s documentary succeeds because in Sicko he identifies the problem, shows some concrete solutions and stresses the importance of caring (I know he glosses over a lot of subtleties, but we know Mr. Moore is not a subtle artist). We need more caring in our system of governance, and not for corporate board members, but for the people who actually pay taxes.

It is true that an organism at war with itself is doomed. So lets start by not making war with our minds and heart. Greed and delusion are not sustainable, but Zeitgeist delivers the opposite message to say that it is. And that I believe is a fundamental error of human belief and thought.

Tags: Documentary, Weekly Deconstruction

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