Rabbit hole 2

Into the rabbit hole we went yesterday – it can absorb our energies for months.

Perceptions are part of the the problem. Ours are limited. Another part is the quality of evidence, and yet another the source of evidence, and our abilities to interpret it correctly.

A friend once remarked to me that our view of reality is like that of a ditch digger: we look over the edge and see very little. Yet what we see from this ditch is the whole of our reality, so has to do. A wise person accepts that we don’t see or know much.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), spent his career analyzing our interactions with media. Each affects us differently. Some are “hot,” supplying high definition and requiring little viewer participation. Movies, with high quality images, put everything in front of us so that we can sit back and relax and enjoy the show.

Cartoons, on the other hand, are but crude outlines of reality. We have to supply almost everything so that characters come to life. What are Eric Cartman and Kenny, after all, but crude little animated circles?

McLuhan’s definition of a “cool” medium – low definition, high participation – applied to cartoons, telephones, speeches, and television.

Television requires that we look into the screen, but it is a flat presentation. In order to use it, we have to supply dimensions, depth and context. We don’t just watch our TV’s. We enter them. Thus does it have such power over us, becomes our reality. If it is on TV, it is real.

This was true Tuesday morning, 9/11/2001 – we did not observe the events of that day. We participated. They are etched in our consciousness. People get angry when skeptics say that the images were fake. Skeptics are saying that reality is fake.

9/11/2001 was a “psyop,” a psychological operation with images well-crafted in advance. Our news media actively engaged in fakery and deceit. But networks were nothing but the willing vessel. Behind those vapid faces and coiffured hairpieces are corporations that are wired to the military-industrial complex and who own and manage our reality.

What do we know for sure? The Twin Towers went away. The Pentagon had a hole. That is all we can say with certainty from the TV images. Since we’ve all talked now to witnesses, we know that World Trade Center complex was destroyed. That was real.

One image given to us, of an aircraft sliding through a building as a knife through butter, is something that cannot happen in real life. (By the way, notice how the building moves in relation to the plane in this GIF image!) There were no eyewitness accounts of that, but it was on TV. Since TV is reality, we have adjusted our reality to fit the images. Newton’s Third Law was suspended that day.

The television networks lied to us. This is proven (a word I seldom use) since the planes hitting the buildings could only go through them by mans of “CGI,” or “computer-generated imagery.” Physical reality does not allow that.

The television networks owned our minds that day, and served as the conduit by which other lies were fed to us in our traumatized state. We were fed a farcical tale of hijackers, a demonic image of a man in a cave, and “photos” of 19 “hijackers.” One of them, Mohammed Atta, was an obvious “Photoshop” creation, a Freddy Kruger-like image made to enter our nightmares.

Once we know that the television images were contrived for effect, our job is to get out of our ditch and find more and better evidence. But we cannot go places and see things, we cannot know the minds of those who contrived that event. That means that we must decide who we can trust, and who not.

Thus does the rabbit hole provide many turns and tunnels.