Tweetios: Incestuous relations between media and government ANNOTATED NEWS, IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE, MEDIA SCUM 1 Response » Jun 162011 The Overlooked Revolving Door: Media and Government Tweetios #3 By Clint Hulsey Mike Bloomberg: Media tycoon, mayor of New York. The control of mainstream media by such people keeps the political consciousness of the American people confused and in thrall to the values of capitalism. We often hear about the revolving door between big business and the agencies that are supposed to regulate them. This is extremely prevalent of course, but there is a sort of revolving door that I don’t think is focused on enough. This is the revolving door between government officials and media. Every time there is a war being discussed, whether it’s Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, or whatever other country, the major corporate networks always trot out whatever Generals they happen to be paying to drum up support for the war. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
Slaughtering animals, crime, & societal health ANIMAL MARTYRDOM, ANNOTATED NEWS, ARCHIVES Comments Off Jun 162011 From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2011: Editorial feature: Slaughtering animals, crime, & societal health By Merritt Clifton, Animal People A cow being stunned moments prior to being disemboweled. The man performing this task is called a "knocker". Phillip Danforth Armour (1832-1901) is today remembered only for the meatpacking company he founded, but in his own time was lauded for allegedly contributing to the progress of civilization by moving animal slaughter out of sight, smell, and sound of women, children, and decent men. Born into an upstate New York farming family, Armour drove barge-hauling mules alongside the Chenango Canal in his teens, then walked all the way to California at age 19 to join the Gold Rush. He soon discovered that more gold was to be made by starting a Placerville butcher shop than in mining. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
ARCHIVES-The art of fiction: Norman Mailer ANNOTATED NEWS, ARTS & FILM, BOOK NOTES Comments Off Jun 162011 Norman, the Great MANY READERS FORGET that The Greanville Post is not only a political animal; it is actually a politico-cultural animal, as culture, the grand matrix of society, forged on the submerged anvil of economic power relations, largely determines the permissible choices people can take. In this interview, originally published by The Paris Review, Steven Marcus tackles one of America’s postwar literary lions, the unclassifiable (by design) Norman Mailer, a man who, like other highly gifted megalomaniacs, unapologetically manufactured his own legend as the pre-eminent enfant terrible of his age. “I think of myself in the third person singular,” he once blurted rather superfluously to a friend in the Village. Mailer was one of a kind indeed, one of the great writers America has produced, and Steven Marcus has done a fine job capturing his fast-moving idiosyncrasies. —PG _____ Norman Mailer, The Art of Fiction No. 32 Interviewed by Steven Marcus This material is protected by copyright The Paris Review, to whom we express our thanks. The interview took place on the afternoon of Saturday, July 6, 1963. The setting was Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, whose living room commands a panoramic view of lower Manhattan, the East River, and the New York harbor. The living room is fitted out with nautical or maritime furnishings and decorations, and Mailer, his curls unshorn, seemed at odd moments during the afternoon the novelist-as-ship-captain, though less Ahab than Captain Vere, and less both than Captain Shotover in ripe middle age. Mailer had recently stopped smoking, and the absence of nicotine had caused him to put on weight, which he carries gracefully and with vigor; the new amplitude of flesh seems to have influenced his spirit in the direction of benignity. Continue reading » Did you like this? Share it:
