We just thought it was interesting to note this video clip from the movie Network is even more relevant than it was thirty years ago when the movie debuted. This is the movie that gave us the famed line, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In the clip, Peter Finch rails against the public which has been dumbed down by television and don’t read books or newspapers any longer. Sound familiar?
Television is not the truth Finch tells us. “It’s a goddamn amusement park.” TV will tells us anything we want to hear and it will lie to deliver. Combine that with the rest of the media business’s insanity and the our fixation with celebutards and the world depicted in the recent movie Idiocracy seems completely plausible.
It’s uncanny how much that Finch speech, delivered thirty years ago, rings true today. We are a nation of obese sloths with stomachs bulging over (and under!) our belts who lay around playing mindless video games, watch inane television programming and worship celebrities instead of true heroes.
The most important people in the world, teachers, have been reduced to underpaid babysitters who can’t even discipline children for fear some uppity parent will sue them for mistreating their spoiled child.
We watch Britney Spears over and over and over and over…and over deliver that train wreck of a performance at MTV’s dismal VMAs giving Chris Crocker and MTV more attention and ratings than they deserve.
PerezHilton is one of the most widely read websites in the world while newspapers and books fall further and further out of fashion. No one wants real news. We want salacious gossip.
We care more about who wins American Idol than why and for what purpose our troops are in Iraq…or anywhere else they are in the world because we have no idea since we never watch the news or read the newspaper which forces the media to stop reporting because they perceive we don’t care and we’d rather know when Britney was last seen wearing no underwear.
Is it any wonder why a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a map and why that question can’t be answered coherently?
We are as dumb as we were thirty years ago and if things don’t change, the twisted world of Idiocary will become a reality.
