"Chapter One: The Web of Trust"

By William A. Whittle @ Eject! Eject! Eject!:

.... Let's look at Western Civilization at its naked pinnacle, at the height of its sheer fabulousness: Oscar night! It's almost time for the Best Supporting Actor award!

Let's start with the obvious: The amazing set, the stunning lighting, the beautiful people — not just American stars, but world-wide phee-noms. This culture reaches around the world. It's a fair bet that every other crazed Jihadi getting lathered up for a good round of beheadings in Iraq or Afghanistan or Malaysia is wearing a Spider-man T-shirt or a Miami Dolphins cap or a pair of shorts with a Nike slash or one of the millions of other little trinkets mass-produced as easily as skin cells falling of the body of a sleeping Goliath.

But let's peel away layers, shall we? One by one?

What about the television network that allows us to watch such things in the comfort of our homes? How much work did that entail? I work in television; I know how television and computers work — in theory. I could no sooner build a television or a computer from scratch than I could walk to Hawaii. I would be utterly incapable of manufacturing the most simple, basic component of a computer — one of the keys, say, or the on-off switch. Completely, and totally beyond my ability.

How many people did it take to make just one plasma TV screen? Just one? Not just the people that assibled it — how many people made the components of that plasma set? How many people does it take to make just the little green power LED? That's not done in a hut somewhere. And let's not even begin to imagine the work needed to build the transmitters and fiber-optic lines, the satellites and launch systis, the local cable service, and their lines, and the repair technicians, and all of that.

I routinely have to enter a major communications ground center to arrange satellite uplinks to New York from L.A. Imagine a wall two stories tall and fifty feet wide, covered with perfect, brand-new color monitors — several hundred in all — on which is every show being broadcast over only a single satellite systi. Hundreds of programs, in scores of languages, going up and down from satellites 22 thousand miles high — the entire world talking all at once, and those giant gold statuettes only one little window among hundreds, and thousands more unseen.

And the world... yawns.

Peel another layer: somewhere, a man is walking across a poured concrete floor, inspecting huge generators that power an electrical grid that simply boggles the mind. None of this lighting or TV happens without it. In much of the world, electricity is still non-existent, or rationed to a few hours a day. Not here. And this generating plant relies on water being pumped through likewise unnoticed underground arteries, being watched over 24 hours a day by anonymous men and women up along the 5 Freeway, not watching the show because if they did there would be no show.

And another layer: Outside, a man stands on the street talking into a radio. His job is to coordinate the few hundred limousines lined up like rail cars at a switching station. No show without thi, or their drivers. Or the people who run the gas stations that keep thi running. Or the mechanics that repair the engines. Or the people that deliver the ice to the 7-11 to fill the champagne holders. Or the people that delivered that champagne in trucks, moving through the city at 3 am. Or the people that made the tires for those trucks. Or the Portuguese Engineer's Mate, 3rd class, who is attending to a potentially dangerous hydraulic leak on the container ship that brings the tires into Long Beach.

And another layer: That man, on the radio? He presses a switch, and inside that radio a connection closes. That connection is made with a very small amount of gold. That gold was mined by another man in South Africa. That miner was fed by a cook from Thailand. That cook's mother was saved by medication developed by a pharmaceutical lab in Philadelphia. One of the biochiists who developed that medication is alive only because of a paciaker made in North Miami. The man who ipties the trash in that medical office is a big fan of Andy Garcia, and one of his favorite movies is The Mean Season. And one of the reporters in the Miami Herald Newsroom in The Mean Season was...me.

And it never stops...ever. It just goes round and round. Any permanent break in the Web of Trust and the Oscars... go away.

But back to the show: Oh, look! George Clooney has won! Let's see what he has to say? Uh-huh. He's talking about how brave Hollywood is. For going out on a limb and speaking up against the repression machine. Yes, there he is, like all courageous dissidents: worth millions of dollars, his every utterance fawned over by armies of reporters and millions of admirers, telling us about the incredible courage it takes to speak up in Bushitler's Police State. God, the sheer guts it must require to be a Liberal in Hollywood.

He's just come off of two brave, brave adventures, you see: one where the heroes are pampered, high-powered television executives, who, in a time where they rigidly controlled all of the information going out to the vast majority of voting citizens, bravely stood up and refused to acknowledge that many of thi were mibers of a foreign-controlled organization devoted to the destruction of their nation, and championed their unwillingness to take the same oath of loyalty required by the most destitute new citizen or the most simple farm-boy soldier. My God! What heroes!

But the award is for his moving and nuanced role as a representative of the American government, and it's complicity in the illegal assassination of a kind and deeply moral Arab leader who only wants his wealth to be shared by his people, before being killed by rapacious, soulless American businessmen who only live for chaos and war because it helps line their pockets.

And the next day, this brave, brave man will wonder with a straight face why "liberal" has become a dirty word in America....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 08/02/06 05:35:58 PM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.