Archive for November 9th, 2010

The Mantra Switch

When people talk about big happenings, they want big causes. When Kennedy was shot, no one wanted to attribute that to one lone nut job, especially a Communist nut job.
That is a major reason conspiracy theories flourished.

That is what makes BUGS so hard to sell. No one wants to hear that the historical catastrophes we have seen were the result of simple causes. No one wants to hear that all that complicated talk about race relations just comes down the Final Solution to the White Problem.

I just wrote a piece here about how television was monomaniacally New York-centered from the history of granting licenses. The average person who hobbies in politics would say that is a cute observation and go on to Big Stuff.

In big historical events, people associate realism with Big Stuff. Reality is not made of Big Stuff. Reality has a lot of Big Stuff, medium stuff, and tiny stuff. The catch is that when you talk about the little stuff, like TV programming, very few people want to hear about it.

Which means their picture of the world is completely unreal. If a plane goes down, it may be the result of a terrorist plot or it may be a tiny piece of defective equipment like the one that knocked out all power in the entire Northeastern United States for hours in the 1960s.

If that happened today a dozen books would come out showing it was Arabs.

The article about early New York provincialism in TV programming was written to DEMONSTRATE the truth that no one is as provincial as a rube who thinks he’s sophisticated.

The rule here is that you don’t reach reality by searching for excitement. You could have talked yourself blue about Arab Terrorist Plots or some other Great Conspiracy causing that Blackout, but the fact is that the blackout would have continued until you replaced that one little switch.

Our movement can get lots of membership with News and Jews. But it will get nowhere until it gets to the basics.

I have spent over a decade trying to get them to change that one switch. I will probably literally die trying.

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