Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Serena Joys and Pseudo-Journalism
Audio Transcripts
05/02/07
[Start Program]
(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)
Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.
I’ve got a couple of interesting topics for you to ponder over tonight…
First up: an interesting new term courtesy of one of my Brutally Honest supporters…
Serena Joy Syndrome: Applies to any female anti-feminist who is against women's rights all while enjoying the rights feminism brings them for the sake of their own ego and greed. All while not realizing that if their side were to win, the rules will apply to them, taking away all the power, independence, money, and freedom they took for granted.
Now for those of you who do not know who Serena Joy was… that’s a character in the book “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. The story is about a dystrophic theo-conservative society where women who could still conceive children are forced to be surrogates to the women who cannot. The women who are forced into this reproductive slavery are not allowed to have their own names. They’re just referred to as Olfred. On the other hand, the wives who cannot bear children do have names. Serena Joy was once thought of as a star in society, a televangelist and social lecturer in her own right, but once she got married to the local military commander and she couldn’t give her husband a child, she became bitter and empty. She basically felt cheated.
I know that conservatives are scratching their heads for a moment and are asking themselves what RIGHTS have feminism provided. If you’re talking “rights” as in the US Constitution, you’ll only find one… and that’s the one that allows women to vote in elections. But in terms of causes, issues, stances, you’ll find that feminism has opened certain doors that were not previously available for women.
Okay, semantics aside, the idea of describing certain women as Serena Joys certainly has some merit if you look at feminism as a concept for what it originally represented: individual empowerment. Mind you, that’s not how it is viewed today, but way back when men weren’t treated as “the oppressors”, feminism was about empowering women as individuals. That’s the way that it was back when “The Handmaid’s Tale” was originally conceived.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have a different view on “empowerment”. They tell women that they could be just as “empowered”, but only under a strict set of rules and only under a strict set of conditions. You can only do it under OUR banners, and do so to support OUR causes and OUR crusades, and you can never forget YOUR PLACE in all of this, because this is all about US and OUR causes and OUR crusades. This is not about you. You’re our mouthpieces. You’re our friendly faces. You’re just a very public cog in our great social machine. Nothing more and nothing less.
THAT is the world of the Serena Joys. They’re bitter because they have sold their souls to the cause and are now realizing the price they are paying for it. This is the arrangement made by women like neo-con pit bull Ann Coulter.
Maybe that explains her venom… her desire to up the ante and thoroughly castigate and demonize those which do not support the conservative cause. Her desire to set herself up to be even more than just another conservative talking head... because she knows that at the end of the day, that’s all that the cause thinks of her as being. Nothing more and nothing less.
By the way, thanks to Carrie Kube for coming up with that term. If you have your own new term that you would like to try out here, send me an email at David2@myway.com and I’ll hash it out here.
(Pause)
Hey, here’s a quick thought… why is it that smog has a “season”? Here in Atlanta, May 1 is seen as the “start” of the “smog season”. Now why it that? Does the SMOG actually follow a calendar? Does it actually linger around on rooftops and in exhaust pipes thinking “boy I can’t wait until May first when I can just leap on out and strangle a whole bunch of asthmatic kids and old farts”? Obviously it doesn’t. So why do WE put a calendar date on it? From my perspective this is just another media ploy to frighten people.
Sure the health risks are there, but if the weather doesn’t change between April 30th and May 1st, then why should the media suddenly declare May 1st to be hazardous and April 30th to be just an ordinary day? That’s just screwed up, and the air-fluffed ego-driven media really needs to re-think this whole thing.
(Pause)
Okay, here’s something else to think about… there’s been a lot of talk since the Virginia Tech massacre about making sure that crazy people don’t get guns. They’re talking about closing legal loopholes and rewriting laws so that a person’s mental history can be filed in some huge database. Yeah, great, just what we need, Big Brother being run by Dr. Phil!
And of course being knee-jerked around by FEAR, the great unwashed will go with all of these Big Shrink database ideas… but I’m going to make a prediction as to what will happen to change our current lemming mentality.
It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but either one of two things – or both of them - will happen in a couple of years:
First, you’re going to have a thirty-something woman get killed by her psychotic abusive ex-husband or ex-boyfriend, and it’s going to come out that she was NOT ALLOWED to defend herself because she suffered from post-partum depression a decade previously and was still in the database as a threat, so she couldn’t get a gun to defend herself like she was told to do.
Second, the private sector will get their hands on that database, and then you’ll be hearing about insurance companies suddenly dropping people from their coverage, you’ll be hearing about companies suddenly getting rid of people, and you’ll be hearing about apartment managers suddenly evicting people because they showed up in the database for some sort of mental problem in their past.
Now, I want you to think about all of the schools that declare kids to be ADHD in their sleep and hand out Ritalin like it was candy. If that shrink database goes into effect, all of those kids will be on it. Maybe even YOUR kids.
Still think it’s a “neat idea”? You still want to roll the dice with your children’s futures? You keep on playing this game and it WILL happen!
(Pause)
Okay one more…
I’d like to seriously suggest that CNN media personality Lou Dobbs run for president in 2008.
Now mind you, I’m not saying this because I think he could win it, because he probably wouldn’t. And I’m not suggesting the he runs because he supports the things that I believe in, because he certainly does not.
I’m suggesting that Lou Dobbs run for president because he’s pretty much done everything else in his role as a CNN air-fluffed media personality EXCEPT to make that announcement.
Let’s get brutally honest here… there is a difference between being a journalist and being a commentator, and the air-fluffed ego-driven media has been really blurring that line for quite some time now and really doing everyone a grave injustice because of it.
I am a commentator. I am not a journalist. That means that I don’t have to pretend to be impartial or unbiased. I AM biased about the things that I talk about AS a commentator. These are MY views.
People who claim to be journalists, on the other hand, have an obligation to at least PRETEND to be objective and impartial about what they are reporting on AS journalists. I mean, sure, ACTUALLY being objective and impartial is next-to-impossible. We all have our own biases. That’s just human nature. But the effort still has to be made.
Dobbs, on the other hand, doesn’t do that. I’ve seen his programs. He lets his biases just blast on through.
There was one story that really stuck out on this. Local school officials got their boxers in a bunch over some kid leaving a ham sandwich out to piss off a Muslim student, and local idiots really lived up to the “idiot” portion of their name by trying to make the incident a federal HATE crime. And as he’s reporting the story he goes into this lengthy diatribe about how WRONG the officials are on this matter and how utterly stupid they look in doing so.
Now granted, I agree with Dobbs on the issue, but to be blunt, that wasn’t his place to make a comment like that! You want to comment on the issue? You set it apart from your reporting on it so that people know the difference between REPORTING on the issue and COMMENTING on it. Or better yet, you leave it to people like ME to do the commenting.
And I know that he’s not the only one who does that. How do you think that a hack tabloid reporter like Bill O’Reilly got to be where he is today on FoxNuze? FoxNuze followed CNN’s lead. So did MSNBC and many others. That is of course the problem with having a 24-hour news network… you gotta fill all of that time somehow. At least some of the other networks TRY to keep that line, but they don’t always succeed.
But here’s the thing: when you blur the line between journalism and commentating, you’re really taking the focus AWAY from the issue and putting it on the person providing it. So when Lou Dobbs reports on the news, the show is not about the news… it’s about Lou Dobbs talking about the news! When Lou Dobbs talks about the problems facing the Middle Class, he’s really talking about the Middle Class as LOU DOBBS sees it, not necessarily how it really is. When he talks about illegal immigration, it is about illegal immigration as LOU DOBBS sees it, not necessarily how the issue really is. And on this issue he’s extremely quick to interject HIS view of it in every discussion.
Now do you understand why I refer to the media as being ego-driven?
And by the way, the same thing applies to O’Reilly, to Keith Olberman, and to anyone else with their own name-driven program that pretends to be a journalist. There really needs to be a clear dividing line between journalism and commentary. Newspapers used to have that… it’s called the editorial section. It’s high time that the rest of the news services followed suit.
So Mister Dobbs, I know that you really like to have your little special town hall meetings, and you love having your viewers drop subtle hints about your books, such as the one you have called “The War on the Middle Class”. But if you’re going to be constantly interjecting your take on the issues into the discussion instead of letting the actual guests and audience members do that, then do us all a favor, take a lead from Jesse Ventura and run for public office. Just get the suspense of it all out of the way. Then at least you could stop pretending to be a spectator and actually BE recognized as an active participant in these matters.
(Computer – some stuff… but I won’t tell you here in the transcripts!)
(Fade Music In – “Heretic/Hero” by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori)
You know every time I talk about the media and what it has become, I really end up bugging my best friend from our high school days. And it’s not like I do that intentionally… this guy actually has a degree in journalism and did work in radio for a while.
But what he sometimes doesn’t understand is that when I talk about the news department becoming nothing more than bunch of media personalities, I’m not saying it because I think it’s a good thing. I’m saying it because THAT is how the people who run the media think of it as.
Look at who owns the 24-hour news services. CNN is owned by a movie studio. MSNBC is owned by a company that makes light bulbs and washing machines. FoxNuze is owned by a media mogul that runs a tabloid-style newspaper and creates TV programs that feature twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers. THEY are the ones that don’t see news as an honorable profession. They see it as being no different than any other kind of programming. They see it as entertainment. And they treat the people providing that kind of programming accordingly.
No, I don’t think of it as a good thing. But then again, short of cancelling my cable service, there’s really not much I can do about it except to bring it up at every opportunity and remind people of that bigger picture, even when doing so pisses them off.
(Pause)
Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!
(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)
[End of program]
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