Postmodern Situation Room

My brain, alas, is slightly pre-postmodern, and discombobulates when frames of reference become too tightly intertwined. Take the fake news—The Daily Show from Tuesday--CSPAN shows a congressman objecting to calling a group of senior Bush advisors “the Vulcans” because, given what he sees as their truculence and deficiency in logic, they should instead be called “the Klingons.” News of a sort. The Daily Show picks it up and calls the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Spock portrayer Leonard Nimoy, for comment. Another Trek veteran, George Takei interrupts. So we have policy examined via fantasy, reported as news, rendered as satire, given context by actors reprising their fantasy roles. Small wonder that modern newsrooms all appear to be modeled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (the set of the bridge, that is). In the next half hour we find that fake conservative talk host Stephen Colbert will have real conservative talk host Bill O’Reilly (who was the mold from which Colbert was struck) as his guest, and that Colbert will also appear on O’Reilly’s show. A double-dittoheader.

Looking for relief from the media mirrorball, I fire up my office radio today for On Point, only to find an hour-long look at anti-terrorism policy as colored by the Fox thriller series, 24. The superhuman antics of Agent Jack Bauer are contrasted with actual ops, and an alarming number of real anti-terrorism types declare their fandom—Yikes!

Mostly I like to think “What is reality?” is a rhetorical question. But apparently, this is a fantasy I can no longer afford. The “point of contemplation” in my yoga class this week concerned how the body can experience that which has never happened to it, solely through the impact of our thinking. In a sense we become, therefore, what we watch. At the moment, I am sore all over.