Liberal no. 46/1999
Dear Mina,
the force of television images penetrating our homes is such that I do not know how to defend myself and my children. There is no time when you can be comfortable. It is not only the explicit violence that worries me, but also the absolute emptiness that emanates from TV. Lately I have had to close my eyes to images of a mother beating her few-month-old son with unprecedented viciousness. Why must we continue to suffer these constant violations of good taste and common sense?
Roberto T., La Spezia
Carousel curtains or the premonitory theme song of the series of commercials or the superimposition of the words “promotional message” are conquests to decency and respect. I am waiting for the same attention for violent scenes. Labels such as “physical violence,” “spiritual violence,” “intellectual violence,” and “ideological violence,” with specifics related to the age of the raped or the gender or category in question, could be steps toward freedom of zapping or even freedom of participation by any voyeurs in particular sadomasochistic erotic moments.
Personally, violence doesn’t scare me, it disgusts me, and it is enough for me to think about and participate in the violence that privately each human being has to endure in order to live or survive. I hate the sudden onslaught of the intimidating image with the opinionated, arrogant little finger of asshole moralism admonishing you, “You have to look, that’s good for you.” There is more violence in the ideological pitfall hatched behind the backs of unprepared victims than there is in the content of a scheduled, debated, though questionable, execution of a death penalty.
But the polymediatic beotium continues to implement its work of brainwashing. They are sucking our souls and cellulite. A delinquent liposuction of the brain, an underhanded action that is leading to the creation of a new burinic humanity, a leveling of our synapses that someone would like to reprogram to make us all full inhabitants of the “global village.” Of that village of which I boast that I am the biggest idiot, who does not want to participate in this monstrous rite of scrapping intelligence.
By now they are no longer even faint evanescent streams, the ones I hear coming out of the cathode ray tube. This is about broadsides that smash the monitor. Gutted bodies, live deaths, gratuitous violence, along with piles of human case histories, in which the grandfather fantasizes about groping his grandson’s fiancée or the adulterous birdwoman eternalizes in TV living rooms.
When I turn on the TV, I would like to be warned of what metafluid crap is about to pour into the house, so that I can at least prepare a gas mask, of what feasts of caphonic burinism are about to spew, so that I can resort to some antidote.
I went so far as to clamor for the Kessler ballets or, for lack of anything else, Milo’s crying or the asylum-like “ask a question and give an answer” of the unwitting Marzullo. I would rather rewatch all the legendary episodes of “The Black Corsair Grandmother.” Aridatece the magician Zurli.
No: life, death, weeping, and love are unique and unrepeatable realities, characterized by absolute singularity and irreproducibility. When they are replayed and thrown in their faces, all these facts are reduced to a representation, they become pale icons and simply useless. The medium instrumentalizes and eliminates the truth of the fact. All that remains is the provocation, which has as its counterpart the emptying of the reality that one would like to present. After seeing three dead bodies or a few live suicides, we are already anesthetized and the sequence of images, while horrific, warps and distorts our perception to the point that they no longer have any effect on us.
The strategists of mental manipulation, under the guise of novel sorcerers of excommunication, are wagging their tails sinisterly as they continue to perpetuate the new mythology of artifice. And the lifeless cathode ray tube, spitting out monsters in a continuous stream, turns the poor helpless people who submit to its radiation into carcasses.
I want to see Carrà’s ass instead.
