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Dedicated to my Postwar Class
After 80,000 citizens
of Hiroshima melted
to nothing
in split seconds of
Atomic flash, some
physicists at
Lost Alamos decided
to take responsibility
for what they had wrought,
spending remainder
of lives fighting for
nuclear disarmament.
They made connections.
They took responsibility.
Not once in memory short
or long has a TV station,
a rap singer, a record producer,
a moviemaker, or band member
made connection, taken responsibility
for "entertainment products" in
the free market of unconcern, those
which reflect &, yea, reinforce social
pathologies of this here culture where
the only bottom line is the bottom
line, where success alone determines
the acceptable, and the unacceptable
is only what fails to sell.
Forget 1 million teenage pregnancies a year
No connection.
Forget Madison Avenue more brazenly pushing the limits of sexual explicitness
No connection
Forget the 40,000 teenagers who contract HIV each year in midst of Epic Death AIDS Epoch
No connection.
Forget the epidemic of drive-by shootings, wife-beatings, girlfriend killings
No connection
Forget the hyper naturalistic stop action special effect high tech violence that fill
our theaters
No connection
Forget new phenom of serial killers stalking way across our psyches & country,
stressed, lonely, lost citizens
No connection
Forget bizarre rash of cult-like killings, dismemberments, mutilations by the fully crazed
No connection
Forget massive denial of social problems. Hollywood, where are you?
No connection
Forget non-sequential, non-sequitur random glitz MTV images colonizing fantasies
on turf of what used to be your very own imagination
No connection
Forget increasingly stressed, alienated, book illiterate populace desperately
searching for diversion, escape or sensation.
No connection
Forget all this, but merely
consider: how can it be
that most powerful, pervasive
media in history of world
does not significantly
shape our thoughts, desires,
impulses, fears, reactions,
responses, reveries, daydreams, etc?
And I read that in
Deutschland, some
rock bands now
call for a "New Reich,"
while on state side, Ice Cube's
rap, #1 on the charts,
merely takes a tough line
on the "bitches" &
threatens to "bust
their vaginas."
Good Night.