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An article by Sarah Nardi in Adbusters magazine #78.

That’s the problem with infotainment media, says Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. It has created a culture of passive, uninformed Americans accustomed to being spoon-fed their informaiton. At its most innocuous, infotainment is grossly over-simplified, occassionally inaccurate and often irrelevent “news” passed along to a less than vigilant public. At its most insidious, infotainment is the carrier of disinformation – partisan agenda maquerading as fact. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the War on Terror. It’s the vague and ill-defined threat to our Democratic ideals.

But we know all of this. We know the story is bullshit, we wknow the network is owned. We know that every second of soft-interest celebrity update peddled to us with the manic urgency of breaking news is a fallen soldier unrecognized, a humanitarian crisis ignored. We know that We Were Lie To. But still, we come back for more.

Why?

Jacoby’s argument – explicated in the book with frightening historical support – contends that since the time of our nations inception, we have become steadily more divorced from the process of reason. Citing factors such as the rise of religious fundamentalism, the decline of educational standards and our growing technological dependence, Jacoby argues that, as a nation, we have become not only dumb, but increasingly incapable of rational thought. Six out of ten adults can’t find Iraq on a map, but we fail to see how that’s a problem. Fewer Americans are learning foreign languages because more and more of us don’t believe that it’s necessary. Our collective standards for knowledge have become frighteningly low. Our expectations of each other and ourselves, increasingly slight. And with each generation born into the ever-darkening age of unreason, we move further from the enlightened ideals out of which this country was born.

But Jacoby’s arguments, no matter how fresh, how sound, how meticulously researched, are all-too easy to forget. That failure isn’t hers, it’s ours. Jacoby offers perspective – a map charting the paths that have brought us here. It’s a tool designed to help us understand the past. But history offers nothing if we’re unable to understand ourselves in relation to it. Every shrug, every mindless utterance of baseless fact – every time we roll our eyes at the depraved state of media but continue to watch – we contribute. We look around and see the problem. We sadly shake our heads. And then we go about our lives. We are the reason behind unreason.

From Adbusters #77, The Global Moment, an article titled Your Moment of Truth by Laurel Saville. It’s about an art piece by Tino Sehgal called “This Situation.”

As with his other pieces, he is looking for a deeper level of engagement between art and audience. In “This Is New,” museum attendancts read newspaper headlines and visitor responses determine the continuation of the work. In “This Success/This Failure,” young children pull passersby into an empty room to play. In “The Situation,” Seghal is asking the audience to consider larger issues along with the players, while expressing his discomfort with our culture’s love affair with consumption and his impatience with the conventional search for political solutions.

“The big new task of my generation is, how can we morally defend our lifestyle, which will not be possible for future generations,” he says. “A political solution won’t do it.”

An article I read today in the New York Times that kinda pissed me off. Here are some of the key points. This activated my anti-corporate thoughts. In a world with this many people it seems to me that corporate culture will have to exist, I am trying to come to terms with how that can be done in a positive way. That is when I’m not pissed off at corporations and ultimately my fellow people for being so greedy.

“The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated. The debate has put some companies on the defensive, including Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives.”

“Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off, are advocating consumer education instead.”

“Tesco, for instance, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product’s carbon footprint.”

“Mr. Datson of Tesco acknowledged that there were environmental consequences to the increased distances food travels, but he said his company was merely responding to consumer appetites. “The offer and range has been growing because our customers want things like snap peas year round,” Mr. Datson said. “We don’t see our job as consumer choice editing.””

An article in Adbusters #76 by Stan Chung. It’s a short story questioning the concept of marriage while telling the story of a couple divorcing after 25 years of marriage.

It’s nothing new to say that men and women can fundamentally misunderstand each other’s needs, but it may be interesting to begin mapping out a new territory for marriage, especially if marriage is to survive beyond children and mortgages and sleek waistlines.

Is it any surprise to you that, according to a recent piece in The Globe and Mail, the majority of divorces above the age of 40 are initiated by women?

Is it any surprise to you that marriage is one factor that statisticians say has proven to increase our life spans? Just as we spurn it, we discover it’s the best thing for us.

As more and more people separate, choose to live alone, or decide not to be married in the first place, marriage becomes the exception not the norm.

Traditional gender roles have changed but many couples are still confused because they don’t know what the new rules are. What does he do? What does she do? Who decides about the position of the toilet seat? How do we find the right balance between our own needs and the needs of our partner?

Baby-boomers are not only facing retirement surrounded by issues such as “the meaning of my life” and the “legacy of my life,” but they also have to pay for the Darn Good Life, and we all know it ain’t cheap.

When people feel a lump on their body, they see a doctor as soon as possible. When people sleep next to what they think is a lump, they’ll wait five, ten, maybe 25 years to do something.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel firemen don’t put out fires–they start them in order to burn books. Good, albeit scary, stuff.

On the way downtown he was so completely alone with his terrible error that he felt the necessity for the strange warmness and goodness that came from a familiar and gentle voice speaking in the night. Already, in a few short hours, it seemed that he had known Faber a lifetime. Now he knew that he was 2 people, that he was, above all, Montag who knew nothing, who did not even know himself a fool, but only suspected it. And he knew that he was also the old man who talked to him and talked to him as the train was sucked from one end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion. In the days to follow, and in the nights when there was no moon and in the nights when there was a very bright moon shining on the earth, the old man would go on with this talking and this talking , drop by drop, stone by stone, flake by flake. His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag anymore, this the old man told him, assured him, promised him. He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate opposite things, a third. And one day he would look upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the long journey, the leave-taking, the going-away from the self he had been.

What a dreadful surprise. For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But lets not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it’s too late, isn’t it Montag?