Goodbye Enemy Airship

Eins, zwei, drei, vier!

Rollback the camera now... slowly pluck the guitar strings

"I'll meet you in West Germany
October 1983
I know that freedom was a lie
And your husband was a spy
You say that words are impotent
But they can help us pay the rent
I knew for sure there was nothing left
Except the vodka on your breath"

More and more everyday the world appears surreal and rather bizarre to be honest. Well not my immediate surroundings; probably because they are closest to me, and appear blurry at best. I'm usually too enamoured with some new band or record to be able to be too introspective.

But today while fixing up some pasta and a broth of meaty goodness, the tele was on in the background... and they were advertising this new "reality" tv show: it was about this woman addicted to meth and she had a family with two kids at the same time. To cut to the chase the punchline was: will she choose meth over her kids?

It sickened me to my stomach to see to what new levels they stoop to grab airtime and ratings! To quote one of my friends back in helsinki its "social pornography" (of course he said that about Dr. Phil... a man who is on my deathlist. Truly repulsive individual!).

Is this the new stage in our psychological evolution? We've become so detatched and desensitized that we can enjoy full-on self-destruction and tragedy.

The question is this a new thing, born of urbanization and people jacked up on meds and lack of faith or whether its just the institutionalization of a sick tradition. Should we just blame corporate tv companies for cashing in on our tears?

If we take a retrospective viewpoint on the matter... a parallel comparison could be drawn to the Greek tradition of tragic theatre. The pinnacle of Greek literature are the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. A favorite theatrical device of many ancient Greek tragedians was the ekkyklêma, a cart hidden behind the scenery which could be rolled out to display the aftermath of some event which had happened out of sight of the audience. This event was frequently a brutal murder of some sort, an act of violence which could not be effectively portrayed visually, because the theatre was also conisidered a holy place?!

The Greeks for whatever reason, thus omitted the image and the actuality of death and the climatic execution of a tragedy. The reality tv show drew back the Greek veil over suffering and rolled the cart so-to-speak on to our Flatscreens. Without any tangible restrictions we get to enjoy even more of the gory details of a woman shooting up, while her kid is growing up in a world where he might as well have been victim of an abortion.

To be honest...we do enjoy tragedy, its the most sincere form of sympathy.

For 45 minutes we can feel like we share some of this woman's ordeal and can feel her pain. But we don't! We have enough commercials in between to distract us and tell us to buy more ford SUVs.

But the woman in the tv show...if she's actually real, can't take a break from her miserable shit-storm of a life. No it's a bottomless pit and she's the star!

"Shoot to kill, I dropped a pill
Then I threw a bottle of drink down my throat"