Video clips and Yeats

Recently a quondam “news organization” filmed some child abuse for our entertainment. Now, what’s up with that?

I understand, that when you’re filming in, say, Baghdad, you’re under military supervision, and not free to rush out with a pocketful of band aids at the site of a roadside bombing. But I do NOT understand how you can look at tape of people beating minors and then just edit it to commercial cut length and run teasers for it during the dinner hour. This isn’t an expose of the Klan. This runs with interviews of movie stars about their birthing notions. This is taking the problems of an ordinary family and making it into telegenic gladiatorial combat. Is that education? Is it news? Or is it pandering to our voyeuristic devils?

Did it start with the Loud family? Was that the place where we decided that the concept of “privacy” was outmoded? Was it live reporting from Vietnam?

Or is the problem that most of us would rather be on television than actually value our lives, so paparazzi, reality TV and all manners of everyday violence no longer touch us.

Have we all become inmates of Andy Warhol’s salon?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world


And at the speed of broadband, yet.