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Paper Tiger Vs. Zippo Lighter,
Part 2
by Jasa Petrovic Slovjanski
July 28, 2002
If you have read the first part of this series, you will be familiar
with the concept of ridiculing the media without using racial terms. This
skill is useful in turning a lemming into a reasonable person. A lemming is
someone who lets the establishment think for him, so you must break down
that establishment's image in order to force the lemming to start thinking
for himself. The establishment trains lemmings to fear and hate our
beliefs, so this subtlety can be used to get a lemming to shun his former
masters while remaining open minded to us on a personal level.
In our last episode, I attacked the poor quality of television. I started
with comedy programming and reality TV as my initial targets. For this
piece I will pick apart news programming, starting with local news. Once
again ladies and gentlemen, I tear apart the opposition without a single
racial comment! The lemming will never see it coming!
Local news varies depending on location. Obviously news in Cherryville,
Kansas, is going to be a lot more boring than in Los Angeles. Here in
Phoenix we have barely any real news, so the local stations invent their
own. Here's an excellent example. Last night I was watching Law & Order:
Crime and Punishment, one of only a couple decent shows on network television (The
Simpsons is the other one). Outside there was a huge rainstorm that is
completely normal during the Summer monsoon season. It was bad enough that
Channel 12 was periodically interrupting the dialogue with the occasional
warning, but then they had to pull this little number:
Prosecuting Attorney: I just noticed something here that could be vital to
turning our case around! It you look here you will notice that....
12 NEWS SPECIAL REPORT!
Newsman: It's RAINING!
While the dialogue is paraphrased this is precisely what happened. For at
least five minutes newsmen informed me that it was not only raining, but
raining very hard. Of course this sort of thing does not happen during
commercials. God forbid we miss one of the 34 high-quality commercials that
air every break! And thank the lord that anchorman Chip Obvious is there to
tell me that there is a bad storm going on! How horrible it would be if
Americans actually stopped paying attention to the idiot box and LOOKED OUT
THEIR DAMN WINDOWS!
Local news is also parasitic in nature. Any time a major news event occurs,
local news stations (at least ours) like to point out that there are people
from our area that are somehow involved in the major stories of the day.
This tends to lead to the 6:00 news sounding like this:
1995
Anchorman: The Oklahoma City federal building has been bombed; Timothy
McVeigh had connections in Arizona!
1999
Anchorman: US troops are going to occupy Kosovo; some of the troops are from
Phoenix!
2001
Anchorman: Two of New York's tallest buildings have been destroyed by
terrorists; Phoenix also has tall buildings!
Local news is also known for the most irritating human interest stories in
existence, such as the one where the 3-legged dog saves a baby. In addition
to these televised sleep-aids, there are also a lot of annoying
"investigative reports." These are the ones where some product that may or
may not have hurt or killed someone is portrayed as a worldly manifestation
of Satan himself. About two months ago the bane of mankind's existence was
the deadly 15-passenger van. I'm lucky to be alive today as I spent a lot
of time riding around in 15-passenger vans while in the army. I live life on
the edge!
Like the rest of TV, local news is a waste of time. Skip it and you've just
added another thirty minutes to your day! Now let's stretch that into an
hour by taking on the national news. National news is just as bad but for
different reasons. First of all, national news is even more alarmist now.
Every day there seems to be a new terror threat: Hot dog carts rigged with
Semtex, exploding livestock, poisoned French fries, etc. If Bin Laden plans
to hit us again he's going to do something that nobody expects, just like on
September 11th; there's no point in imagining all sorts of potential
threats. That's the government's job, and knowing them they'll probably
just screw up again. The national news is also infamous for the
vilification of the Serbs throughout the '90s. The big networks didn't want
to "confuse the viewers" by reporting objectively on all three sides in the
Bosnian war, so they created the policy of Serbs = bad, everyone else = Good.
The national news' human-interest stories are even worse than local. From
them we get stories like: 3-legged dog saves blind baby that is also a
Holocaust survivor (the dog or the baby, you decide). The same goes for
national news investigative reports. Instead of the dread of 15-passenger
vans, you find that a certain soft drink happens to be 65% lethal. Of
course they won't tell you which one until after the top stories and
business news. My advice is to take your chances and turn off the TV.
Before ending this article I want to take a shot at another TV cliché: the
cheesy action/drama show. The more insipid shows are the Walker: Texas
Ranger shows. These are the ones where our hero, a gritty New York
cop, defeats the entire Al-Qaeda network using martial arts. Then he
explains to us at some point that not all Arabs are bad, and that Islam is
really a peaceful religion. Of course this is only the case if the Arab
nations learn to embrace democracy and do what they are told! Another
vomit-inducing fantasy show is JAG, where every episode teaches us that
America and her military are really great. Often the show revolves around
plotlines like this:
The male Navy officer: It seems the Russians, Serbs, Iraqis, Taliban, and
Al Qaeda have all teamed up to attack the US with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
(Cut to Russian general)
Russian General: Ha! We have tricked the Americans by pretending to have a
long history of conflict with Islam that spans several centuries! Now we
will crush them, my Taliban friends! DEATH TO FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY!!!
(Cut back to Navy legal office)
Female lead actress that is too attractive to be a Marine: Why does
everybody hate our freedom? Our military sure is honorable!
To me, shows like JAG would be hilarious except I know that millions of
Americans actually buy this trash. One minute Americans wave their flags and
call for the destruction of Arab nations, while at the same time America
fights a war to create more Muslim nations in Europe -- and the "patriots" all
approve! About false patriotism I only have one thing to say: I don't care
how many buildings Bin Laden takes out, you couldn't pay me to BURN an
American flag, much less fly one.
I think in this and the last article I should have given you readers enough
ammo to rip television to shreds. Find your own variations on these themes
and use them to pry lemmings away from the TV. Once a person is
disconnected from the propaganda pump, he can begin to reason again. In my
next article of this series, I will be attacking a target that has had it
coming for a long time: Hollywood!
JASA PETROVIC SLOVJANSKI
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