Monday, September 3 – In the penultimate frame of yesterday’s Doonesbury, after rattling off a short but appalling set of facts about the U.S. national debt, radio talk show host Mark Slackmeyer asks his guest, “Where did the myth of GOP financial responsibility come from?”
While we can’t verify or refute Trudeau’s notion that the Easter Bunny and the myth of GOP financial responsibility share the same origin, we are compelled to point out that the myth of which he speaks shares a delivery system with his own cartoon: newspapers — corporate-owned, profit-driven newspapers.
They are so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible, like water to a fish. And we absorb polluted information through them even if we don’t read them; their persistent blather permeates the infosphere.
While running cyber-errands, we found a clip [which we have temporarily yanked until we figure out why it keeps screwing up the rest of the site, but you can watch it here] of Geov Parrish describing, not just the fundamental flaw of commercial media, but its antidote: independent media. It’s worth watching in its brief entirety, partly because he tells a hilarious tale about how he got into publishing, but here’s the money quote: “[C]ommercial media [is] all a fiction,” he says. “The music that we hear, the culture that we get, the news that is reported; it’s all a fiction. The news is mostly just all entertainment, the entertainment isn’t even particularly entertaining; it’s the stuff they sell us between the stuff they sell us – the advertising. And then they turn around and sell you, the audience, to the advertiser, and that’s how they make their real money.”
Not being the sort of person who would talk the talk without walking the walk, Geov is a founder of one of our favorite papers, Seattle’s terrific little Eat the State! We love Eat the State! How could we not?
Mostly we love it for its heart. It calls itself, in its “tiny print,” “a shamelessly biased political journal. We want an end to poverty, exploitation, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, environmental destruction, television, and large ugly buildings, and we want it fucking now. We are not affiliated with any political group or party. We publish Eat The State! as a not-for-profit way of sharing information, resources, opinions, and hopefully inspiring action in our community.” We also love it because it’s distributed free, every other week – two attributes we find most appealing.
A Labor Day Thought, from Eat the State!:
“I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.” — Bruce Grocott
Note: We “quote” Garry Trudeau’s strip Doonesbury with an itty-bitty graphic taken from the official site, Doonesbury.com, with considerable trepidation. We like to think this use is defensible under the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. copyright law (the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work). If Mr. Trudeau disagrees, he may of course sue us. We will, in turn, countersue for his use of the term “chickenhawk.”