[Newspoetry] Defining News Before It Breaks

[Donald L Emerick]

Pre-script:
I love definitions; I collect my thoughts in such nets, webs, traps, holes, mouths of words.

You shut your trap when you have said a mouthful of words, because
(a) they might fall out of your mouth, on your feet or
(b) they might choke you to death (like a pretzel) when
you don't chew them up carefully, swallow them down neatly.


Defining News Before It Breaks

Who wants breaking news?  In what senses does news break?  When it breaks, how does it do so?  Is news repairable when it is broken?  Who are the news doctors if anyone could repair news?  Is all news only a reparable, parabolically circling around a hole, lurking around a truth that is never to be stated because it would be unsayable?

"And, now the news..." says the announcer on the radio.  So, the first call of the news occurs, in the order of time, after all of the other things, as an incidental item of diversion from your regular forms of entertainment.  The news would be marginal information, relative to the advertisements.  I would always have to leave the room, to go find food, or to manage other bodily functions, when the news comes on, because the news reminds me that I have hunger and yet that I have already been stuffed and filled to overflowing.

The newscaster acts as a straightman to the strange humor of the news, as well demonstrated by that pioneering media group program product called the SNL News Breaks, for such bravado gave way to an entire industry that lampoons the news, to show people that there really is nothing there to take seriously, and there is nothing there that could not be laughed off and forgotten, like an old joke.  Irony comes only to be clever in dismissing the news as nothing but an excuse for a bad joke played upon someone else, somewhere else.  McLuhan might have talked about this desensitivization: in the global village, the cool fool (the village idiot) would become the prototyping news organization.

Now, it would be critical -- as I noted in my "Imperial News" opinion, that the Administration be able to define the terms of any debate -- because it would speak for all of us.  So, it was clear -- to me -- that the Administration was but a small step-away from a more radical Mental Health program, than the one that it announced afterwards, after I wrote my opinion -- which had no seriousness to it -- which only spoke of depression and depressing of reason and fact, of the pandemic effects of such pandemonia in megalomania's disordering pan-demonizing and other pundigital panditoria.

The MeGa(Willy)LoMania Administration (aka MG(W)LM Admin -- where MG means thousands and LM has its traditional Latin numericity to it, for 1050) really has nothing else to do, than to hunt down the LowMen (and Women) on the totem pole, to demonize them, and then to bomb them into oblivion -- and it makes such a dramatic profile of its spineless courage, that Hollywood has gone ApeShit (to quote a newspoet from some months back) in war flick productions, borrowing tanks and jets and troops to prove to us all how it behooves a country to pretend that its causes are so great and so noble, as therefore to warrant the murder of others --- possibly even innocent bystanding, standing by in their innocency and their dwellings --- as long as the great and noble cause is said to be served.

And, the MGM Admin knows that it does not pay to mention the possibility that two (or more) wrongs never make a right -- they would seem to make a worse; they would make a lesser evil into a greater evil, and not into a better evil.  A lesser evil could become good only be becoming better than it has been, only by defining its past conduct as producing the kinds of harms that are its present self.  One produces one's present self, as a collection of miscellaneous items, from all of the trivia which is floating down the river of time, washing upon the shore.  (See my opinion, "Lost At Sea Literature", which describes and reports on the carnage of recent floods, in blue-blanching crimson tides.)

So, the news breaks, and as it breaks down, then we don't have to break down -- not mentally or otherwise.  The news becomes the sacrifice of sanity: the news goes insane so that no longer question our own sanity.  And, when we have no idea of our own sanity, as to whether it could be just what it always pretends to be, then we are most ready to be loyal followers to the royal regime of megalomania.

Why (doncha know?), the Black Tower of London was only a benign-intending institution -- it was a primitive mental hospital, because madmen who thought that they were King (or Queen) or some such royal personage -- were put in that place so that their mental illness could be headed off, literally, in observing one of history's most anti-radical surgery protocols.  The cure rate was 100%, but a few may have last thought the cure far worse than its allegedly diseased cause.  If people lose their heads to deceptive megalomania, should heads roll on the floor, laughing outloud, laughing their silly heads off?

So, Bush is trying to usurp definitions of sanity, by appointing a commission, to define the terms of mental health.  This interferes with my human freedom, my constitutional right, my god-giving duty, to define my own words, to speak my own thoughts, to say what I would mean and to hear what others would say, too.  Down with definitive tyranny!  Up with obscuritous anarchy!  (And, sideways, sidle out of here if this is not breaking news you want, need, find useful.)

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

(Post-script: Is it news if I think of it before it happens?  It would be a confirmation of a prediction, the investiture of wisdom, to prescribe the future: the stuff of the counterfactuality of prophecy -- which always broke the back of the news that was nothing but the tales of the olds, as to how what they were doing, in a present administration, was all of the news that was fit to print.  If you had loved with Jeremiah, you would probably never have seen a wrinkled HeadLine that said "Jeremiah Tells King: Yield".  And prophets hated the idiots who came after, turning each future oriented saying into a past-dominating proscription, inverting and negating prescriptions only possible use or value!
T4L, DLE  (And, what's poetic about this writing, if it were to be poetic and not unpoetic, if such were imaginable?))
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