What a hellacious lineup! What a day for deep democracy! Global warming and poverty—not to mention Conquest, War, Famine, and Death—quake in thy long luxurious leather boots!
Just hours after I virtually announced on this very widely-read anti-capitalist chat "page” how I pine for a great lefty show in the hallowed slot between Chuck and Chris, God answered my prayers most bountifully: the Vanster!
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I tuned into Greta’s first show on MSNBC tonight. The words fail. Such magic. I almost hope these are the last days. I'm ready Jesus! Come get me. No time for sentimentality, only let me pause parenthetically to note before I go: call me old-fashioned but I just can't quit the good liberal Roman Catholic Lawrence Francis O'Donnell, Jr. I hope that one day, like John on the island of Patmos, he truly gets the last word at MSNBC.
Revelation 3:16 King James Version (KJV)
16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.
But seriously: it is with sadness that I announce MSNBC is now officially “fair and balanced.” The death of any pretense of "liberal bias” in TV news and commentary, at a token cable network, in the mass medium that used to unite most Americans in viewing current events from time to time is sad to me because it is one less major chance to fight divide and rule
I love TV—though I don't watch much of it these days—not only for having given us Green Acres but also for its tragic lost potential. I did a mini-homage to the medium and its meaning to the masses last Thursday night after I watched a dose of great vintage TV in honor of the late great John Berger, who died a week ago. www.dailykos.com/… And as noted above, within hours of my sweet baby essay being published, the Greta show was announced in all its glory.
Suffice it to say that no resurrected John Berger is going to get a slot on MSNBC. As observed by Jacob Brogan in the New Yorker:
Berger was a committed Marxist—“Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible,” he wrote in “Ways of Seeing,” a representative statement that still seems remarkable in a book produced to accompany a popular television series—and his attention to materiality had a political aspect. His writing often focussed on problems of labor; artists, Berger reminded his readers, are actors in the world, each creation a worldly performance. As Robert Minto puts it, “Berger takes art out of the sanitizing temples where we store it and drops it firmly back onto the easel, in a messy studio, where a sweaty artist bites her lip and stores her way of looking in an object.”
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Now let us go back to our regularly-scheduled micro-programming, chosen just by me, or you, divided, ruled, but still the coveted target of hegemony.