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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Sunday, March 21, 2010 |
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The Year In Review
The America One Sees Depends On From Where One Looks
America held the passport to the future, good grief – they even drove cars that looked like they could fly, and the sun always shone! As an impressionable youngster, this was the future country of my dreams.
Tony Koorlander
As a child of the 1950s, my view of the USA was gained though the only window that I had – the ‘media’ as such it was in those stark post war days. For those of us abroad, the America we knew, admired and grew up with, arrived in flickery black and white images of daring do men, beautiful women, and clear separation between the bad guys and the good ones. Heady stuff for a boy growing up in post war Britain.
Black And White America
The adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, films like ‘The Longest Day’ TV shows like Highway Patrol, Dr. Kildare, and Whirlybirds, progressing via 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaii Five-O to Perry Mason and Cannon, onwards to M.A.S.H. to Star Trek.
What I perceived, in my youthful exposure to that magical country far away, was an America of clear values filled with very clever and astute people who would be expected to fly to the Moon and planets beyond as part of an everyday experience, live forever, and shape the years ahead. The TV series ‘Outer Limits’ convinced me that America was so important that even aliens would prefer to land there!
America held the passport to the future, good grief – they even drove cars that looked like they could fly, and the sun always shone! As an impressionable youngster, this was the future country of my dreams.
Nothing seemed impossible. America could fulfill everyone’s dreams, and save the World from the doldrums of complacency, the threat of war, diseases and old age. What a marvelous place this America must be.
Then, with the advent of satellite television transmission the America of Westerns, Dramas and Situation Comedies took on an entirely new dimension — Live News from places I had never known, but yearned to visit and experience.
Even as a youngster, I sat avidly in front of the old black and white TV at my grandparents watching the first scratchy pictures of America beamed live via satellite to the receiving stations in Goonhilly – only 70 miles from our southwest England home. The same satellites later brought us tragic pictures of the Kennedy assassination and its painful aftermath.
Which was the real America, I wondered in my youth? The wondrous fictional American where the impossible seemed so easy, or the other one, where scary and horrible things really happened?
BBC Television -- One View Of A Complicated World
Many years later, I watched as camera operator and technical co ordinator in the studio at the BBC when I was assigned to our Apollo 11 coverage. We based our broadcast on CBS News’ live satellite feed including fuzzy, sometimes wiggling, live images from the surface of the moon. What an amazing technical accomplishment. Broadcasting House workers queued outside our studio door to get a first view of the live feeds from the Moon.
Thanks to our coverage that day, Britain witnessed the first manned Lunar landing — including live feeds from Cape Kennedy and Houston. We thrilled at the unfolding events for they confirmed the America we always saw on television — a nation capable of sending men into space even as we watched them walking about on the Lunar surface.
What happened to that America?
Where has it gone? What has gone wrong?
Is it still there somewhere, did the scales fall from my eyes? Or, as I have wondered recently, were they just dropped by Lady Justice?
What we see of America today is not reassuring. The consumer engines powering the almighty United States of America seem determined to repeat the imperfection of all previous civilisations that once seemed worthy of the mantle of Empire.
Resting on one’s laurels .. a term, supposedly from the earliest Olympics to designate the actions of one who had achieved their greatest — afterward expecting that achievement to earn eternal status without further effort.
This is an image repeated throughout history, an aspect of human nature that is predictable and constant. Nobody fails to embrace the ideal. The Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the British, and now the Americans.
‘We’ve done all that – and now it’s enough!’
Is it enough? I it over? Is there something more — something beyond consumerism, massive wealth accumulation, and the flagrant arrogance with unaccountability of big dealers and flim-flam Ponzi schemers?
Or is self-absorbed, wealthy and powerful America going the way of all great empires?
Just as we did here in England.
Has greed negated America’s zest for perfection, and the time-honored search for excellence? We wonder about such things here in Britain. And for good reason.
Consumerism and the capitalist trap embodied therein, is a profiteering engine designed to engender growth and financial stability. It works by fooling the poor man into thinking that he can own the trappings of the rich. The route to that, particularly post World War II, has been the mass production engines of low labour cost countries.
We never ask why it should be possible to pay virtually nothing to own something that our parents would have paid handsomely to own. We don’t question the advertising that propels us into ownership of products that have no tangible benefit to anybody, yet allow our psyche a comfort status within our virtual communities. We are led to imagine our elevating status with those that we don’t even know by believing the stories told by the news and marketing engines lurking in the corners of our homes behind the facade of the haunted fishtank.
So … let me ask my Yank friends. Is your current malaise temporary? Or has it permeated nation and peoples? Will you let it pull the rug of initiative from under your feet? Or, will you respond with the clear purpose and character of the Americans we came to admire on film and television?
Our education system is floundering, our social structures straining, and the window through which the World sees all Western civilizations increasingly concentrating on the Lowest Common Denominators ( LCD ) of our daily life.
Network news has seemingly a simple agenda … local news follows suit … generally .. news – in order to be valid – has to embody the elements of worry, tragedy, fear – or even panic .. and the timbre of delivery assures its reception as such. Like it or not, the pictures that hit the headlines, are what the World sees of your country, and probably that alone is the perspective they remember.
The only man convicted for the PanAm Lockerbie bombing was recently set free, on compassionate grounds, by Scottish authorities. When he arrived in his home country, Libya, the media showed a rapturous welcome and Presidential handshake for someone who is lucky not to have received the death penalty, yet ironically now faces it through incurable disease. What message was sent to the world? That Scotland is a right honorable nation with principles, values — and compassion? Or something very, very different?
Or, did television coverage suggest that all Libyans were unanimous in what appeared to be a joyous, perhaps celebratory reception? Is the entire Libyan nation represented by what we saw? Ought we feel anger against the whole country?
I don’t believe so.
What the media shows the world is a distorted perspective — a restricted view arising from a media system designed to sensationalise a small event. One airplane lands with one dying person, who may have been wrongly convicted, yet who becomes an icon of representative anger and grief. This one person is welcomed by about 100 or so family, relatives and friends he left behind – who are innocent of any crime, and who wave the Scottish flag as a way of thanks for the compassion of those whose decision enabled their welcome. The man is hustled quickly into a car and driven away.
What television coverage delivered was neither accurate or complete, for they showed the world a country seemingly anxious to applaud a convicted criminal – someone proven guilty of an appalling outright attack against the Nation of America and its people.
The story was framed as the peoples of Libya giving a hugely arrogant and disgusting anti-American display. But that was not what happened.
Were Libyan attitudes wrongly portrayed? Did such coverage add to the misconception of America as demon?
Turn this picture around … look at how the World sees America through the windows of its News reporting.
Does anyone see a nation of peace lovers, of healthy practices, of concerned helpers, of scientists busy solving the problems of health and old age, of generous aid missions to underprivileged countries, of restoration and community rebuilding in places devastated by natural disasters?
All these things are still in place and significantly outweigh the negative images of a continually warring and aggressive nation that are progressively pushed down the throats of viewers – of a nation that invented the serial killer, has mass school murders, drug-fueled knife and gun crime, pandemic disease and terror, where the most sophisticated and uncontrolled weapon of mass destruction lies within the hands of every gun owner, and where it is dangerous to walk the streets.
The peddling of fear through the ‘window’ of news has become absolute and destructive. America lives in terror – of itself.
What do you imagine the rest of the World sees?
America has not entirely lost its dream, or its way in the World, yet the pecuniary forces controlling broadcast are enabling the World ( and its own people ) to see it as thus due to a massive ignorance of the way media – International and local, presents the imagery of America, and tells the story of everyday life.
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