Arab Spring
(7:30)
I want to understand this “Arab Spring”. Yet as I watch my TV, channel to channel, I see nothing but olive-skinned men with guns. Guns and more guns, shooting in never-ending interchangeable repetition before anonymous cameras from hidden corners. These seductive (journalistic) TV images represent most all I’ve ever been shown of the many uprisings throughout the Middle East...as if there were no better or more intellectual performance to broadcast to me.
How can this be? One answer is that telecasting endless Arab guns is as seductive as telecasting forbidden Arab sex. After all, seduction is the black-magic elixir in all media profitability. Endlessly broadcasting Arab guns on-screen is pornographic production, equally pornographic to the deepest, darkest, most sacred and perverse Arab ‘representation’ of all: Arab Women. Cameras are guns and we always shoot the innocents right along with the perpetrators.
And so, this critical montage is a comparative metaphor, an allegorical lament, constructed to shame us all: media makers and warriors, guns and camera technologies, broadcasters and viewers alike. For all are conflated into willful forms of seductive pornography upon our screens.
Take your pick, and enjoy.
9 March, 2011