"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.
