Mao Tse-Tung hour

Check out Billmon's fascinating look at the state of the Iraqi insurgency, in particular its propaganda apparatus.

Billmon argues that the fact that various components of the insurgency, including the group set up by Zarqawi, have established a sophisticated televisual propaganda apparatus, including themed talk shows and grisly confession/execution videos, tells us that the insurgency is developing into a sophisticated enterprise similar to the Sinn Fein, mixing legitimate and illegitimate components.

Billmon makes reference to the film Network, which you should see if you haven't already. It's a sharp and engrossing satire about the media from 1976, and touches on issues ranging from the corporate ownership of the press, televisual spectacle, the rubbernecking compulsion of television audiences toward the violent and profane, the insoluble confusion and alienation of modern (or perhaps postmodern) life, and radical chic. It stars Peter Finch, who won an academy award postumously for his role here as Howard Beale, as well as Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and Ned beatty in a supremely creepy role.

Aside from the fact that Network is relevant to television shows that make suicide bombing and assasination appear legitimate by wrapping them in the banality of daytime TV, there's something of Network in our times in a more general way. There's a lack of trust in institutions like government or press, one I feel is well earned.

Times are hard for people. Health care and energy spiral in cost. GM, once the measure of America's economic success, has fallen on hard times, but Product Chief Bob Lutz claims it would be a terrible mistake to cut or continue a freeze in executive pay. Lutz made roughly $4.4 million in 2004. Nothing makes sense. The rich get richer. The congress is full of crooks- more than that, politics has become a criminal enterprise.

And TV deals with the chaos with Celebrity Fit Club, and similar pointless absurdities. Oh Well.