Fox: TV News by Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 film "Gaslight"

Fox News is dedicated, not to journalism of course, but to gaslighting. It’s the perfect term for their modus operandi of propaganda peddling. "Gaslighting or gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception and sanity,” Wiki notes. “Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. The term owes its origin to the play ‘Gas Light’ and its film adaptations."

How the Superhero Rose in the East

One of the original street paintings of the Golden Bat

I came home to find a package of Christmas presents I’d ordered from Edward R. Hamilton, including one for myself — Eric P. Nash’s Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theatre.

Street performers painted and performed comic-book-like adventures in Japanese cities, selling roasted potatoes and chestnuts to the kids who thrilled to them. The exploits of characters like the extraterrestrial Prince of Gamma and the Golden Bat were featured.

Wearing a skull mask and a flowing red cape, the Golden Bat flew to the rescue from his lonely arctic fortress and used his  superstrength to fight weird menaces like dinosaurs, giant robots and space aliens.

But this character debuted in 1931, seven years before the appearance of Superman. “Perhaps as a product of some collective unconscious,” the author suggests.

That fascinates me. Were superheroes not invented, but inevitable?

The Spy Who Came In to Read Bond

Sean Connery as 007 in "From Russia With Love;' Richard Burton as Leamas in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — portrayed by film actor Richard Burton — remained cold to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, at least at first.

“Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about nine and read a book of Ian Fleming’s called ‘You Only Live Twice.’ A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food, drink, national morals, etc., all of an excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books — I’m not sure which came first — and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics.

“I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts.’ What a contrast between that and Fleming. West’s book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth’ sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken and not stirred.’

“He has the cordon-blue nerve to attack one of my favorite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81^st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and French fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot, before you’d finished the comic strips in the Herald Tribune, or read Red Smith’s wry column.

“Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually maniacal boy scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: “Well, it’s been a hell of a bloody lark.’ And of course, to that bon viveur, woman-chasing intelligently muscled mind it had been.”
— Richard Burton’s journal, March 28, 1969
I think, by the way, the Burton is conning us just a bit here. He knew more about the literary Bond than he could have learned from that one late novel, You Only Live Twice. And although he didn't often go to movies, Burton read hundreds of paperback thrillers, so he'd certainly run across Ian Fleming before, and must have been aware that the novels came a decade before the movies they inspired.

Bravery and Bribery

Arthur McArthur as an 18-year-old adjutant

Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s father, Captain Arthur MacArthur, was a Union Army Civil War veteran of conspicuous bravery. He went on to become part of that western cavalry that later came riding to the rescue in the horse-opera movies, but was actually engaged in the steady, colonial displacement of the Native American tribes.

“As Douglas told the story late in life, his father was serving on a military court in New Orleans when a cotton broker, urgently needing the loan of army transport facilities, attempted to suborn him. The bribe was to be a large sum of cash, which was left on his desk, and a night with an exquisite Southern girl. Wiring Washington the details, Arthur concluded, ‘I am depositing the money with the Treasury of the United States and request immediate relief from this command. They are getting close to my price.’”

— William Manchester, American Caesar.

Consider Character as Clay

I’m impressed by the similarities in the Buddhist ethical views described here and those of Aristotle, who held that habits form our moral character, as well as the existentialists, who claimed that existence precedes essence.

“According to Buddhism, humans have free will, and in the exercise of free will they engage in self-determination,” Damien Keown wrote in his book Buddhism. “In a very real sense, individuals create themselves through their moral choices. By freely and repeatedly choosing certain sorts of things, an individual shapes his character, and through his character his future. As the proverb has it: “Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.’”

“The process maybe likened to the work of a potter who molds the clay into a finished shape: the soft clay is one’s character, and when we make moral choices we hold ourselves in our hands and shape our natures for good or ill.”

This tends to support the view known as “virtue ethics,” summarized by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “…a broad term for theories that emphasize the role of character and virtue in moral philosophy rather than either doing one’s duty or acting in order to bring about good consequences. A virtue ethicist is likely to give you this kind of moral advice: ‘Act as a virtuous person would act in your situation.’”

Help Wanted: A Publisher Who'll Pitch In

A classified ad sales rep at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, which was thrown in her honor

Vexing union troubles in the 1970s had the unexpected side effect of giving publisher Katharine Graham a lot of experience in how the Washington Post worked.

“I learned to take classified ads and spent hours at it,” she recalled in her autobiography, Personal History. “We were stunned at what hard work it was, with no let-up. You took an ad and hung up, and the light was already on with a new caller. Electric typewriters were then used to fill in the complicated classified forms, but since my typing wasn’t up to speed, I took the ads by hand and gave them to someone else to type.

“I tried to avoid the callers who had long, complicated ads — used-car dealers calling in to advertise several cars, for example. But one day toward the end of the strike, I got a Mercedes dealer on the phone, and everyone else was busy, so I had no choice.

“I told him, ‘Look, I’m new around here, so please go easy.’ We struggled through his list of six cars for sale and then he said doubtfully, ‘I think you’d better read it back.’ ‘All right,’ I said, and reread the ad swiftly and accurately. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You sound overqualified. You could be anyone. You could be Katharine Graham.’ I was startled for a moment before I replied, ‘As a matter of fact, I am.’”

See No Evil, Report No Evil, Broadcast No Evil

I contend that the primary problem with the American system right now is the complicity and corruption of the corporate news media, which lets the right-wing arsonists do they like without ever sounding the alarm.
The corporate, political and bureaucratic imperatives under which we operate today preclude the idea that anyone owes the American public the truth. That’s why professional journalism is not merely dying because of shifting commercial considerations. It is actively being slain.