"What's Going On?" "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
By Lil Joe Johnson, October 15, 2019
"Remember that the rest of the postmodern-enlightened world understands that words associated together comprise PERSPECTIVES and not descriptors of some discovered "objective reality." Another way to look at this is that symptom clusters are like stars comprising a constellation. The constellation (say the "big dipper") only "exists" from our point of view on earth. From another point of view far from our solar system the abstraction "big dipper no longer exists. We have to get beyond our entrenched perspective. 'What seems to be an identifiable objective reality - a problem - is only a product of descriptions, the product of social construction'. (p. 73) http://www.psychosocial.com/IJPR_10/Social_Construction_of_MI_and_Implications_for_Recovery_Walker.html
The role or power of political demagogues and televangelists, to a large extent, is attributable to capitalist class media monopoly partisanship and the use of their print and electronic mass media as an instrument, a tool for communication and manipulation. Script reading actors, performers and preachers are, by means of television, present in citizens homes engendering illusory ideas about "reality".
Tools are invented and used in the production and distribution of means of production and consumption. Scientists use tools, instruments by means of which to investigate the universe and understand Nature.
Just as Galileo Galilei and Edwin Hubble used telescopes (tools) to gather objective information and make discoveries by examining the material universe of stars, planets, moons and galaxies, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek a microscope for discovering and investigating the world of microbial life, particle physicists CERN's Large Hadron Collider to confirm the hypothesis of the existence of the Higgs field by producing and detecting Higgs bosons, so Demagogues use mass media as tools, not to explore, discover and reference data by experiments though, but the opposite; to produce, reinforce and manipulate, by means of mass media, unfounded prejudices and fears.
Tools can also be instruments of death and destruction e.g., electricity and electric chair, nuclear physics and nuclear bombs. Demagogues use mass media as instruments by means of which to manipulate the masses. Electronic media enter the home and it's entertainers, politicians and televangelists become part and parcel of the socialisation process directly influencing psychological internalisation, by means of radio, television, movies and advertisements delivered daily, 24/7, into homes.
"The unassisted hand, and the understanding left to itself, possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand. And as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding." (Francis Bacon)
"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it." (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels)
Politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, Jesse Ventura, Al Franken, Donald Trump and Barack Obama are products of mass media rather than persons who arrived there by engaging in political processes. Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler and Winston Churchill were political pioneers in the use of electronic media (radio) to pump ideological propaganda as material phenomena into everyone's home successfully brainwashing millions!
Capitalist and State owned/operated Media is not "neutral"! Capitalist owned media is a partisan instrument in the promotion of political and religious demagogues praising capitalism and ignoring poverty. Media has created and pushed straw man projections into the homes of viewers domestically and internationally attacking socialists and demonising revolution and revolutionaries. The media is an instrument of economic and political ideology.
Voting people in the United States didn't become aware of Barack Obama until the Democratic Party's DNC selected him to deliver the prime time speech to it's Party Convention. Six years later the media enabled Obama to become popular enough for the Electoral College to select to be the 44th President of the nation's federal republic.
"The revolution will not be televised".
Gil Scott-Heron was an example of an entertainer using the same media (radio, primarily) to explain to people the conservative, if not reactionary, character of bourgeois and state mass media. Bourgeois media ostensibly 'report' the "news", but rather it is presented in such a way as to tell viewers what they should think about:
"What's Going On __Are things really getting better as the news papers said?" (Marvin Gaye)
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