Month: September 2007

Maybe we should just run through the America and world conquering slogans on this one:

CNN:

from “The Most Trusted Name in News” to “The Most Busted Name in News”

from “The CNN effect” to “The CNN defect”

from “The Situation Room” to “The Capitulation Room” (capitulation to big money, that is)

from “This is CNN” to “We’ve got ADD”

Updated CNN Slogans and Program Titles:

“We Outfox Fox!”

“Half the Size of the BBC But an Empire Just the Same”

“If Our Advertisers Can’t Live with It, Neither Can We”

“Wolf Blitzer! Even the Name is Absurd”

“Anderson Cooper – I Owe My Job to My Oft Endeering Dear in the Headlights Views of News”

“Nobody Stomps Immigrants Like Lou Dobbs Tonight” (Maybe Not Even the Fox News corporation’s “O’Thuggery Factor”)

“‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ – That Foul-Mouthed Imus Has Nothing on Me”

“‘This Week at War’ – What We Are Programmed For”

“‘American Morning’ – Corporate Dawn”

“‘Paula Zahn Now’ – Eviscerating Vacuity”

“‘The Capitol Gang’ – We Satirize Ourselves”

“‘Crossfire’ – Caught in Our Own”

“CNN – Corporate America at Its Brightest Best”

“CNN – The Triumph of PR”

“CNN – Crucifying the News 24/7″

“CNN – Willful Ignorance Incorporated”

“CNN – Willful Distortion and Deceit Daily”

“CNN – Carefully Neutered News”

“CNN – Craven News Network”

“CNN – Crap Nicely Nuanced”

“CNN – Crucified News Network”

“This Is CNN”

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon:

“The anti-globalization movement may not quite have found its Dante or its Homer in British writer Robert Newman, but it’s found something, all right — maybe its Theodore Dreiser. Newman, the author of two previous novels published in the United Kingdom, makes a splashy, messy American debut with “The Fountain at the Center of the World,” an ambitious and occasionally thrilling book that takes you from a NAFTA-impoverished Mexican village to the sleek corporate hallways of the City of London to the now-legendary street demonstrations at the World Trade Organization’s 1999 Seattle meeting. Newman is himself a veteran street-level activist, having worked with such groups as Reclaim the Streets, Indymedia, Earth First! and the longshoremen of Liverpool. He writes about the decentralized, ragtag fringes of the contemporary left with affection and a wry eye for detail…”

Other reviews:

The American Prospect
Independent
Guardian
New York Times
Tacoma Tribune
Diverse Books
Texas Observer

 

Tony Christini
(1992)

Contemporary writers of culturally critical fiction who depict troubled conventional lives in largely dead end realms of culture undertake a necessary but not sufficient task for encouraging and contributing to social change through fiction. The social impact of these fictions, having recounted the hopelessness and despair systemic of modern culture without attempting to explore crucial causal factors may even be largely regressive, discouraging action or deeper thought. Certainly the impact, the insight and the art could be greater if in addition to degradation, more fiction focused on regenerative aspects at the fringes of culture—more hospitable activities, environments, institutions, beliefs, mindsets and operating principles of culture.

Contemporary novels that have cultural critique as a main focus often plausibly show that an apocalypse of sorts comes every day, that we are living in a sustained and possibly sustainable apocalypse. People are abused. They face social and personal pressures that leave them frequently hopeless, helpless, confused, afraid, hurt, and not infrequently dead. While such works satirize, ironically note, and otherwise record this difficult daunting reality, they often seem themselves to be part of an implicit and overt cultural hopelessness, given the very limited exploration of both progressive social change and other personal-insight-as-it-relates-to-the-public (and vice-versa), that is, psycho-social insight.

On the upbeat side, the novels typically communicate something relatively worthy like, the world is terrible, but if we get “tight” enough with each other, it can still be a special place. Yet little or no movement toward institutional social change is touched on that might aid and protect such hospitable personal (let alone public) life. The books seem to propose that we come together in this socio-cultural wasteland, this technological tundra, and . . . just be. “Cruise cool and alert” (Pynchon). Just don’t get zapped. Be cool. Don’t let it get to you, ’cause no way are you going to get to it. It ain’t gonna change. In Don DeLillo’s renowned novel, White Noise, the narrative reads, “There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze” (321). Nothing to do. And sure enough, that is all the characters seem to plan on doing. The sunset was bronzed by a corporate, technological disaster, a toxic chemical spill. That we need better industrial and environmental regulations seems a plausible thought, but DeLillo’s characters give it only passing attention, if that, and base no action upon such an idea—something readers might learn a lot from and be wonderfully enthralled by, personally and otherwise—nor does the narrative counterpoint very much with characters or perspectives more insightful, and yet White Noise, especially representative of a current dominant ethos in fiction, is one of the most praised contemporary novels. That White Noise and other novels here discussed are highly accomplished I take as a given. What I discuss are the, at least, equally striking, and unnecessary, limitations of such novels and such fiction. Continue reading Fiction and Social Change

Fox News is known by a lot of great slogans it includes in daily TV broadcasts, as well as by the meaning of those slogans made bare:

from “America’s Newsroom” to “America’s Spewroom”

from “The Most Powerful Name in News” to “The Most Pungent Name in Lying”

from “Fox Means Business” to “Fox Means Big Business ”

from “Fair and Balanced” to “UnFair and UnBalanced”

from “Fox is Where the News Is” to “Fox is Where The Lies Are”

from “We Report, You Decide” to “We Distort, You Jeer”

and most recently

from “We Put the World in Context” to “We Put the Odious in the News”

Despite recent losses in viewers, Fox News, the BBC reports, has seen its profits double during the Iraq War, of which Fox is the main official co-sponsor – while CNN, the three traditional networks and right wing talk radio, among others, do their cheerleading best to compete for that distinguished honor.

War profits have reportedly encouraged Fox creator, funder, and media king Rupert Murdoch and Fox CEO, Chairman, and President Roger Ailes to consider further advocating (if not outright orchestrating) subsequent wars, such as a possible WMD obliteration of Iran, perhaps coupled with a new African holocaust, to go along with the current holocaust imposed by Fox-friendly pharmaceutical companies who refuse to give up patent “rights” that prevent that continent and the world from affording to fully treat for AIDS and other diseases.

In addition, Fox News is reportedly investigating whether or not tiny countries and regions like China, India, Venezuela and most of the rest of Latin America (with the exception of the Cuban expatriate section of south Florida) would be susceptible to a cleansing Biblical plague of locusts that might be hatched in Rupert Murdoch’s deep pockets. Popular British geopolitical novelist John le Carré thought he might write a novel based on such inside information but finally gave up the effort as being “too hopelessly factual and depressingly non-novel-like.” Word has it though that pop CEO novelist Michael Crichton is determined to pen “a big story” about “an evil United Nations cabal” that tries to force Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News to pay taxes directly to the UN, the global organization that represents the countries Crichton believes Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News have every right to own and dispense with however they and their financial advisors see fit.

Meanwhile, the media analysts at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) ask – “How are Murdoch, Ailes, and Fox News different from Jean Valjean, the ‘wretched’ character in Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Misérables? Answer: In every possible way. Jean Valjean was forced to flee by the establishment into the sewers to survive and got out as quick as he could; whereas, Fox News is the sewer – competing successfully with a number of other sewers for sufficient toxic sludge to spew each day – those sewers of course being the corporate media – CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS (not to mention right wing radio and the rest) — who prove day in and day out what studies reveal and what the title of journalist Danny Schechter’s media book make clear, ‘The More You Watch the Less You Know’.”

Fox News – The Great Corporate Nightmare.

(With much close competition.)

“Fox News: We Do Goebbels Proud”

“Who Says Lying Doesn’t Pay?”

“Leading Mouthpiece of the Establishment”

“Those Nazis Got Nothin’ On Us”

“Those Who Own the News Control the News”

“The Official Version of Reality”

“Fox News: The First Refuge of the Scoundrels”

“All the Crap You Need Each and Every Day”

“Fox News: Your Source for Sewage”

“Raising Stench to an Art Form”

“Fox News: We Announce – The Supreme Court Obeys”

“Fox News: We Announce – Congress Sings Along”

“Fox News: We Announce – The President Confirms”

“Fox News: We Lead – CNN Follows”

“Fox News: In Praise of The Status Quo”

“Fox News: Rich Views”

“Fox News: The Bright Shiny Face of Big Money”

“Fox News: Establishment Culture, Official Culture”

“Fox News: Brought to You By Corporate America”

“Fox News: We Make a Killing for a Living” 

“Fox News: The Pride of the Establishment”

“Fox News: Ghenghis Views”

“Fox News: Corporate to the Hilt”

“Fox News: Democracy Who, What, Where?”

“Fox News: Eat the Poor, Feed the Rich”

“Fox News: Pro-War and Proud”

“Fox News: To Hell With The World – America Too”

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[This “Plan to Abolish America” series of satires consists of slightly revised pieces posted in advance of the coming “Petraeus Report” on Iraq. The series began with The Petraeus Plan to Abolish Iraq, and will likely end with the same Plan.]