Perspective

"…his hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice and freedom are more than just words- they are perspectives…"
V, speaking of Guy Fawkes - from V for Vendetta

I wasn’t going to write about this, but the more I stared at the vast white screen with my thoughts trending in other directions, the louder the static of irrelevance around my original intent became. So I chucked all elsewhere aspirations and sat down with the remotes in front of the big screen and committed to at least a partial evening of surfing. In that regard, I decided on something other than vanilla for my viewing enjoyment by opting for a divergence in tastes that were closer to a leap back and forth between Americone Dream and Cherry Garcia, sort of. ( I like the names, but have never actually tried either of them.) Every now and then I just have to watch Fox News, just to cleanse the palette of any real world view without having to resort to beer bongs or hallucinogens. And because my laptop has been dead, lo these past many months, I wasn’t able to view the Democracy Now live stream in the same room as the box with Fox on it, so I opted for Current TV and a larger than life (really, maybe somebody should think about passing up the Imagine Whirled Peace and the Karamel Sutra for some fresh fruit or something) Al Gore, who was seated at the commentators table on a pedestal-like chair that set him above the rest, which by default cast him in a role somewhere between pundit lifeguard and daytime TV court judge.

When I got tired of watching one side or the other (which was quite often) I punched the remote to see what was happening on that other side of the looking glass. Fortunately, I had started this self-inflicted media waterboarding very close to the dramatic conclusion of the evening, so the overall depth and breadth of the suffering was minor at best. In flipping around between the restrained enthusiasm of Current and the stunned robins who were making vain attempts at recovering from their repeated slams into the big picture window over at Fox, I somehow missed what was later being described as "Karl Rove’s big meltdown" over Fox’s early pick of Obama over Romney in Ohio. In watching it this morning, it didn’t seem that big, but what was interesting was the walk (of shaming?) that Fox News anchor (I see on their website that Fox refers to them as "on air personalities") Megyn Kelly took between the commentator desk and the behind the scene analysts’ room many hallways away. While it seemed spontaneous, for some reason Ms. Kelly let slip that they had already rehearsed this- one can only guess at why. When she got there she was met with the two head analyst dudes who stated unequivocally that their prediction would stand and that they were 99.95% sure of it. What they didn’t say, although their body language screamed it, was something along these lines: "Take That Rove, you Stuttering Turd Blossom." Somebody may be looking for work elsewhere after that- but then again, maybe not.

The first thing I did manage to scribble down in my mini reporter’s notebook was this: "we should expect more of them…" I’m not sure who said it, but my next note reads "re: the $6 billion spent on the national election." My question directed at the first statement would be simply, why? Just because they spent tons of money to either get or not get elected doesn’t necessarily translate into an equivalency of value to be seen from it, at least not from our perspective. One need only look to the relatively near south from here. What one can find there was a defeat of a proposition put to vote before the population of California. I am of course referring to Prop 37, the GMO labeling bill also dubbed "the Peoples’ Right to Know" bill. If one looks through this particular looking glass one can see, without squinting, a torrent of cash coming from the corporate likes of Monsanto, Dupont, Conagra and others, all with the specific intent of reinforcing confidence in the old adage that what you don’t know can’t hurt you and ensuring that there should be some things that the people just shouldn’t know, especially regarding what they eat.. After all, the global corporations spent a lot of money, $45.6 million or thereabouts, to see to it that the people only know as much as the man behind the curtain wants them to know. That’s real, value-added food production, right? I guess it’s all just a matter of perspective.