It’s an awful summer for movies so far, the kind of movie season that has millions of Americans looking forward eagerly to July, when they will be able to drive past their cinema and visit a book store to get the newest Harry Potter novel. It’s telling that the big movie event of the year was Star Wars version 3.2.4, in which we get to see the backstory to an outdated movie series in which evil is easy for everyone to identify because it snickers and calls itself “The Dark Side”.
Ah, me. There has been a bit of a brighter side in ths summer season this year, with the release of Deep Blue, an 87-minute film about the things that live in the ocean. I definitely feel better about taking my family to see that kind of movie than I would taking them to see the other kind of family-friendly confections that are out in theaters these days, like Chicken Little or Herbie Fully Loaded.
I was about to take my family out to see Deep Blue until I realised that it’s really just the same kind of programming that I get from my local PBS station at least once a week, year round. With programs like Nature, Nova, and Scientific American Frontiers, I’ve already seen everything that Deep Blue has to offer, and I’ve seen it for free.
Sure, sure, movie theatres have great air conditioning, and this is proving to be an exceptionally hot summer. So watch PBS science shows with a glass of ice water. Oh, yes, it’s true that Deep Blue has been shot so that it can be shown up on a big screen for dramatic effect. Of course, you don’t have to sit 45 feet away from your television screen at home.
PBS science shows are uninterrupted by commercials too, just like the movies. In fact, PBS has shown through its quality science programming that there are somethings a public broadcasting service can accomplish that commercial channels cannot recreate. Just look at the pathetic decline of the Discovery Channel, for example, which has gone from showing science documentaries to broadcasting paranormal quackery of the quality of a latter day In Search Of, combined with seemingly endless hours watching hairy guys weld parts onto motorcycles. Commercial television, like commercial radio, always ends up reaching down into the muck for the cheap thrills that sell the most advertising time to a young demographic.
Unfortunately, extremists within the Republican Party are now seeking to turn PBS programming into the same kind of low-quality slop that’s to be found in the land of basic cable. They’re trying to weaken PBS programming precisely because PBS is outside of the control of the corporate PR and advertising offices that have twisted the rest of America’s mass media into its current low-quality, high-profit mode.
With the Republican Party in possession of the federal government, it’s not clear how long PBS can survive in its current form. Already, PBS is coming under more and more corporate influence through its “sponsorship” arrangements. It not too many years, we may be forced to spend 8 dollars at a movie theater when we want to see a nature documentary.
Of course, there is another alternative. They’re called books. Oh, sure, the pictures don’t move, and no one reads the words out loud for you, but they actually contain a lot more information and can be a great deal more entertaining. Go ahead and visit the science section of your local bookstore, and pick up a book. You’ll see that there are no advertisements or corporate sponsorships in there at all. I hope that the Republican Party is not working on that “problem” too.
Books! I am dyslexic (I can and do read, but in my own way) and I’d rather read than anything, almost. I tell kids that I work with, why don’t they teach you to read things other than the most banal crap? It’s that important, they want them turned off (not necessarily teachers, but no one from MY neighborhood is on the school board or administration)with just enough ability to make them useful. I’ve actually gotten some reading and thinking.
When I was a new minted teen, we had just come back from Ethiopia, and part of my catch-up to get into American school was to read a scholastic version of Sanuel Pepys diary. Well, it was heavy going, so my sorely tried father took me to the library and nothing would do but I had to check out THE ENTIRE UNEXPUGATED four volumn set. I very quickly found that Pepys was a very nasty charactor, and got up to all sorts of “tricks” (in the commercial way), and…wow! Just the stuff for a teenager. My father wondered why I had taken suuch an interest, picked up a volumn, and it fell open to one of my favorite places.
Next time I went to check out the set, I was told I was no longer allowed to do so on order of my father. He was much more careful next time he made me do something like that.
Forgive me, people want instant gratiification so books require one to imagine, and to think. In this age of CGI, and muck that passes for entertainment, no one wants to think, they want to blithely go about their business without any thought on what goes on outside their little worlds. They are sheep and cattle content to graze one moment to the next in oblivious psuedo contentment.
Be careful, they will start to outlaw books soon because they do not support the government, they are subversive, or supposedly give comfort to some unseen enemy.
Tell ya, Tabun, you’ve got it. As “wallpaper” I hear quite a bit of what people say when they’re in their own comfort zone with the people of like mind, and it is, well instructive.
If there is a time when people I know get their way, I guess I’ll really be an outlaw. Apparently, all my science fiction, Mad Magazine, Hubbard, Bertrand Russell, and Free Inquiry magazine are “blasphemous”, will have to be destroyed, and I will have to be punished accordingly. Also, my Hightower, Ivins, Chomsky, Henthoff and other, well, progressive authors must also be purged, and everyone knows you can’t unring a bell, so, as I have absorbed this tainted thought, Something Will Have To Be Done about me, besides merely purging my bookshelves of objectionable printed matter.
I hate to belabor the obvious.
But, despite the simplistic and crude story line of the entire Star War series, Lucas is a raging liberal (Kudos).
His, admittedly, clunkly dialogue is an open bitch slap to the entire Right, Neo-Con, Religious Fanatic, etc. movement(s).
Doubts? Watch them again, and pay attention this time.
If he can influence the opinions of the young, all to the better.
We need all the help we can get.
The greed hogs own everything; making it easy to mystify the poor buckra to mobilize against their own interests.
The powerless (Us) have to use any tools available…
Well, Josh, I don’t like simplistic morality even when it comes from someone who some purport to be a “raging liberal”.
The most sinister politicians are those who do not wear dark robes and use obviously negative language like “The Dark Side”. I fear those who are able to subtly follow Orwell’s example, and use light words to describe a dark path – and I count the leaders of the Bush Administration in this category.
Star Wars? Hell, it’s a “Rattling good yarn”, as my Brit colleagues would say. I also enjoy Tolkein. Terry Pratchet, George MacDonald Fraser, and if you can find them, books by Mika Waltarai. I always recommend poetry by “Banjo” Oatterson, Robert Service, and yes, Kipling. And also, yes I HAVE Kipled on occasion.
Star Wars? Hell, it’s a “Rattling good yarn”, as my Brit colleagues would say. I also enjoy Tolkein. Terry Pratchet, George MacDonald Fraser, and if you can find them, books by Mika Waltarai. I always recommend poetry by “Banjo” Patterson, Robert Service, and yes, Kipling. And also, yes I HAVE Kipled on occasion.