"Because she died on TV."
Dec. 8th, 2011 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI recently said that Roger Waters' last studio album, Amused to Death was not aging well. Listening to it again, I listened to his song, "Watching TV," where he sings:
It doesn't seem to have made a difference. Here we are, twenty years after Amused to Death, and we can watch live human tragedy on YouTube or some other rebroadcast mechanism more or less at will. Torture from Syria, drive-by murder in Iran, soldiers shooting pregnant women in Palestine and rebels killing their former leaders in Libya and Iraq. If you want slightly less tragic, you can watch rubber bullets being used on students in Egypt, and American kids getting pepper spray in the face.
It really hasn't made that much difference. A scary number of people treat this as entertainment. Some even Rule 34 the stuff. And the toture, suffering, and death goes on.
She is different from the AztecIt's a song of hope in the middle of a world of tragedy: it's a sign that finally, finally, we see what governments do to other people, and finally we are moved to respond.
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV
It doesn't seem to have made a difference. Here we are, twenty years after Amused to Death, and we can watch live human tragedy on YouTube or some other rebroadcast mechanism more or less at will. Torture from Syria, drive-by murder in Iran, soldiers shooting pregnant women in Palestine and rebels killing their former leaders in Libya and Iraq. If you want slightly less tragic, you can watch rubber bullets being used on students in Egypt, and American kids getting pepper spray in the face.
It really hasn't made that much difference. A scary number of people treat this as entertainment. Some even Rule 34 the stuff. And the toture, suffering, and death goes on.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-09 12:09 am (UTC)The kinds of things that are changing have been centuries in the making. Not changing? In my father's lifetime what has changed with regard to race relations in this country? My Grandfather remembers news of lynchings. In our lifetimes what has changed with regards sexual relationships? We've had it go from gay sex being illegal in places to there are places you can get married. Iraq, Libya, etc? In the last few years, now many dictators have overthrown in the Middle East? This is a process and it takes lots of iterations and time.
These changes take longer then we will live, and there will be a lot of backsliding (think "The Bunny Hop of Civilization") as we go forward. The trick is to keep going, no matter the setbacks.
The people that make the jokes? There's the one making race jokes when I was a kid, and lynching jokes when my father was a kid.
We're changing, just not as fast as you and I'd like and we're not doing it as a species.