One of the great mysteries of our days is the rage that has entered the field of politics. Politics used to be a game with fixed rules and values, played by gentlemen and ladies. Politics was about parties who had their specific values, and their specific support. If you were a workman you voted for the socialists if you were an entrepreneur, you voted for capitalists and if you lived in a manor you were voted. The manors have been turned into hotels and the gap between workmen and entrepreneurs has become blurred these days. The political scenery has shifted and nobody was prepared for it. A new force has come to the foreground: the antipoliticians. What has happened? What suddenly appeared to be wrong with the idea that citizens vote to be represented in gouvernement? Isn't it true that power can only be justified if it's based on consent? What happened to the principle of democracy, the social contract, whereby the gouvernement excercises it's power for the general good?
One of the first things that changed was the disappearance of the general good. Due to the influence of the system of indirect voting and the media, elections have taken on the character of baseball games. It has become a matter of victory at all costs. Victory is the result of intensive campaining, sponsoring and lobbying. The voter has become crowd and winning elections has become a matter of crowd control. The future of the country is no longer an issue, all that matters is the performance of political stars in debates and how they suck up more convincingly to the favours of the crowd. What these favours are, is explained in the media by experts. And the masses of media consumers consume, indifferently. This situation came to be redefined as the gap between the people and the politicians, which was again a brilliant move by the media, because this way they could get all the attention they wanted by describing a nonexisting emergency. The people had become masses, the politicians performers and the socalled gap is nothing but the way they react to each other.
I guess it has a lot to do with the lessons in highschool where teachers teach their children that democracy is the type of gouvernement where the people rule the country. So it's no surprise that many citizens think they have the right to control the gouvernement and if this appears to be not so easy they get very confused. Moreover all institutions deliver on the spot, so why cannot you order a tax cut like you order a new laptop on the Internet?
Nobody knows what the word 'representation' means and what it has to do with democracy. So like in the commercials you look for something to trust: a person who seems for real. Now you're ready to vote. You get bombarded with promises and predictions and you do't know what is true and what not. So you look for something different, something you can understand. You look for someone who could be you, so that it looks like you control gouvernement after all.
The politicians also get confused and many of them try to figure out what's wrong with the system (apart from those of the U.S.A. of course, because we all know that in this country the system is flawless and people there are just free and lucky). They try to be responsable, study their dossiers, balance the pros and cons carefully, hold long meetings to come to a mutual understanding and after all this they get the message that they're not common enough. At this point the antipoliticians jump in. They grasp the opportunity and create an orgy of commonness as an easy and sure way to fame, power and a regular income. So power ot the people has become power to the masses in other words power to the vulgar. This is the politics of antipolitics: the exploitation of the political field for the sake of profit.
Is this the end of politics? No, this cannot be. Why not? Antipolitics needs politics, because it lives of politics as a parasyte, it is political AIDS. The resiliance of political life cannot resign. Political life will reemerge as a phoenix.
dinsdag 23 maart 2010
dinsdag 23 februari 2010
Free and frivolous
Freedom of speech is a great achievement. Some would even consider it the main achievement of Western Society. The West is THE free world and the US of A is the freeist part of the West, in fact the rest of the West is history, or at least a museum of of old freaks. The Dutch, who have strong historical strings with the new world, have tried to support their Big Brother in his advocacy of free speech. And lo and behold they have a reputation, there was a time that books forbidden elsewhere in Europe were printed and distributed in the low country.
Now there have been some issues of free speech lately that require some reflexion. Some politicians and famous Dutch have started a competition in free speech. As in this degenerate times norms and values have become a faint memory, blurred by the daily tsunami of commercials with which the average human being is confronted, this contest has led to some remarkable results. And even the commercials are considered a form of free speech (unless they are about tobacco or alcohol).
The first who won the gold medal was a to capitalism converted marxist who wanted to become the drag queen of the Dutch administration. He claimed to always say what he had thought and to do what he had said. Unfortunately he was murdered only after having spoken in the media almost every minute of his waking life since his claim to fame and doing almost nothing.
The second champion was filmmaker and happy smoker Theo van Gogh. He to was sadly murdered after having called muslims goatfuckers in his weekly columns for almost a year. He did make a beautifull short movie called 'Submission', which became very important for the Maroccan selfconsciousness. Suddenly most Maroccans in Holland discovered they were very much offended and thus had something in common.
The newest star is a politician from the deep South of Holland who'se mother is from the former Dutch Indies and who bleeches his hair with peroxyde. The secret is that he is in love with himself and thinks to seduce a substantial part of the Dutch population by impersonating Batman against the aliens. He is a member of parliament and tries to shock his colleages with insults and unconventional language. He is sued for comparing the Qor'an with Hitler's dairy 'Mein Kampf'. Because of this stroke of genius he calls himself the champion of free speech.
Now what is free speech? Jezus went into the desert for fourty days and during this time he enjoyed really free speech. He could say anything that came to mind, there was nobody who had any objection, because ... there was nobody who listened.
In Holland free speech is called free utterance and that is very correct. Speech is to good a word for the kind of freedom that is at stake. Speech is not a solo game. It takes two to tango and two to speak. An utterance is just a crie de coeur and perfectly possible in the desert. Speech is directed to another person and asks a reaction.It's part of a dialogue. Now if you start a dialogue, you want to tell somebody something. If you speak an incomprehensible language or if you first make your audience deaf or otherwise not capable of understanding what you say, you're a poor speaker. If you do this on purpose you're destroying free speech. Because speach is a way to mutual understanding. Speech is in essence dialogue.
Good speech creates thourough mutual understanding. Mutual understanding enhances the quality of speech, it makes it more refined and clearer. The event of speech in a period in a community is called the discourse. Now freedom of speech depends on the quality and structure of the discourse. The better we understand each other the more we can say and the more meaningfull our speech becomes. People who try to improve the discourse, like poets, writers and philosophers are fighters for the freedom of speach. Those who on the other hand spoil the discourse by insulting, manupilating talk destroy the freedom of speech. So the socalled champions of free speech are in fact its destroyers. Wilders, Van Gogh, Fortuyn, they were all destroyers of the freedom of speech, because of their frivilous selfinterested use of language. And perhaps the most devious act was the redefinition free speech into free utterance.
Now there have been some issues of free speech lately that require some reflexion. Some politicians and famous Dutch have started a competition in free speech. As in this degenerate times norms and values have become a faint memory, blurred by the daily tsunami of commercials with which the average human being is confronted, this contest has led to some remarkable results. And even the commercials are considered a form of free speech (unless they are about tobacco or alcohol).
The first who won the gold medal was a to capitalism converted marxist who wanted to become the drag queen of the Dutch administration. He claimed to always say what he had thought and to do what he had said. Unfortunately he was murdered only after having spoken in the media almost every minute of his waking life since his claim to fame and doing almost nothing.
The second champion was filmmaker and happy smoker Theo van Gogh. He to was sadly murdered after having called muslims goatfuckers in his weekly columns for almost a year. He did make a beautifull short movie called 'Submission', which became very important for the Maroccan selfconsciousness. Suddenly most Maroccans in Holland discovered they were very much offended and thus had something in common.
The newest star is a politician from the deep South of Holland who'se mother is from the former Dutch Indies and who bleeches his hair with peroxyde. The secret is that he is in love with himself and thinks to seduce a substantial part of the Dutch population by impersonating Batman against the aliens. He is a member of parliament and tries to shock his colleages with insults and unconventional language. He is sued for comparing the Qor'an with Hitler's dairy 'Mein Kampf'. Because of this stroke of genius he calls himself the champion of free speech.
Now what is free speech? Jezus went into the desert for fourty days and during this time he enjoyed really free speech. He could say anything that came to mind, there was nobody who had any objection, because ... there was nobody who listened.
In Holland free speech is called free utterance and that is very correct. Speech is to good a word for the kind of freedom that is at stake. Speech is not a solo game. It takes two to tango and two to speak. An utterance is just a crie de coeur and perfectly possible in the desert. Speech is directed to another person and asks a reaction.It's part of a dialogue. Now if you start a dialogue, you want to tell somebody something. If you speak an incomprehensible language or if you first make your audience deaf or otherwise not capable of understanding what you say, you're a poor speaker. If you do this on purpose you're destroying free speech. Because speach is a way to mutual understanding. Speech is in essence dialogue.
Good speech creates thourough mutual understanding. Mutual understanding enhances the quality of speech, it makes it more refined and clearer. The event of speech in a period in a community is called the discourse. Now freedom of speech depends on the quality and structure of the discourse. The better we understand each other the more we can say and the more meaningfull our speech becomes. People who try to improve the discourse, like poets, writers and philosophers are fighters for the freedom of speach. Those who on the other hand spoil the discourse by insulting, manupilating talk destroy the freedom of speech. So the socalled champions of free speech are in fact its destroyers. Wilders, Van Gogh, Fortuyn, they were all destroyers of the freedom of speech, because of their frivilous selfinterested use of language. And perhaps the most devious act was the redefinition free speech into free utterance.
vrijdag 5 februari 2010
De productie van het nieuws
De media zijn handig geworden. Het nieuws wordt routinematig gemaakt en het patroontje wordt al aardig voorspelbaar. Je pakt iets wat het wantrouwen van de massa opwekt en zoekt een malloot die een tegengestelde mening heeft en ten slotte laat je ze elkaar in de haren vliegen. Kassa! Het is verantwoorde journalistiek, want je laat twee kanten zien en geeft het publiek te denken en dat zonder dat je er zelf iets van hoeft te weten! Wat worden we toch goed opgevoed door de media. Ik erger me al maanden groen en geel aan het toontje van radiojournalist Jeroen Wielaert, die ongetwijfeld vaak schrijvers heeft horen voorlezen uit eigen werk. Hij heeft zich een toontje aangeleerd. Deze poseur is het culturele paradepaardje van de radiojournalistiek. Hij noemt zichzelf zelfs 'poète maudit' en 'razende reporter'. Wie goed luistert hoort echter de valse metaforen en overslaande cliché's. Het lijkt trouwens wel of de radiojournaals worden geregisseerd door kleuterjuffen. Om de tien minuten wordt er een zogenaamde 'promo' uitgezonden. Dat is een collage van fragmenten van vorige rapportages, waardoor je verschrikkelijk nieuwsgierig moet worden naar de volgende rapportages. Dommer kan het niet. Stel je voor dat de krant af toe tussen de artikelen door een artikel zou plaatsen bestaande uit zinsneden uit vorige kranten. Iedereen zou direct zien dat dit pure papierverspilling is, niemand zou het lezen. Als je naar de radio luistert, kun je dit echter niet overslaan en verspilt de regisseur geen papier, maar jouw kostbare tijd. Het weerbericht heet nu 'Weddernjoes', wat het niveau van het Hilversumse gekneuter laat zien. News of nieuws zijn berichten over iets dat net heeft plaatsgevonden, maar het weer is een voorspelling of forecast. Bovendien staat alles op de 'oewebsaite', want de omroepers zijn met elkaar een dagje de hei op geweest om te oefenen in de Surinaamse 'w'.
De regisseur van de radio vindt ook dat het eigentijdser moet, dus zeg maar Amerikaanser. Wie wel eens naar CNN of liever nog naar Fox News kijkt weet wat dat voorstelt: de presentator is het belangrijkste, het gepresenteerde is bijzaak. Iedereen moet dus weten wie de presentator is, het is alsof hij of zij het nieuws zelf heeft verzonnen en je moet zijn of haar naam weten. Bovendien doen de presentatoren onderling erg amicaal en noemen elkaar nadrukkelijk bij de naam, alsof zij samen de gelukkige elite vormen die door persoonlijke kwaliteiten de onwetende luisteraar moet verlichten.
Dankzij de methode van de media krijgt de massa de indruk alsof elke mening gelijkwaardig is. Voor elke uitspraak is wel iemand te vinden die het tegendeel beweert. Door dit schema komen Geert Wilders (de gebleekte Indo) en Rita Verdonk (de domme cipier) met de regelmaat van de klok als volwaardige deskundigen aan het woord, terwijl ze aantoonbaar nooit iets aan de oplossing van welk probleem dan ook hebben bijgedragen. De regisseur beslist zelf wat nieuwswaarde is, dus wat wij moeten denken en hij baseert zich op wat hij denkt dat we denken. Wat hij zelf niet begrijpt kan hij niet denken, geen wonder dat hij of zij zo'n voorkeur heeft voor arrogante idioten en dat die niet van het beeld of de luidspreker weg te slaan zijn.
De foutjes in de IPCC-rapporten vormen een laatste editie van deze potsierlijke tragedie die 'het nieuws' heet. Alle klimaatsceptici zijn inmiddels weer aan de beurt geweest. Als het nog langer duurt moeten journalisten weer het platteland af op zoek naar verborgen talent. Want dat heb je wel nodig voor kritische journalistiek. We nemen geen waarheden aan, we vragen door. Zou het niet kunnen dat de hele milieubeweging een samenzwering is van linkse krachten? Er zijn mensen die dat denken en iedereen is gelijk, alles is maar een mening. Vast, laten we de Hummer maar alvast bestellen!
De filosoof Jean Baudrillard had het goed gezien: er is geen verschil meer tussen verzinsel en feit. Het loopt allemaal door elkaar. Meneer Van Zon (op zaterdag) en Jeroen Wielaert zijn beide echte schertsfiguren, dus lach erom met een gerust hart. In de humor zit misschien wel meer waarheid dan in de ernst.
De regisseur van de radio vindt ook dat het eigentijdser moet, dus zeg maar Amerikaanser. Wie wel eens naar CNN of liever nog naar Fox News kijkt weet wat dat voorstelt: de presentator is het belangrijkste, het gepresenteerde is bijzaak. Iedereen moet dus weten wie de presentator is, het is alsof hij of zij het nieuws zelf heeft verzonnen en je moet zijn of haar naam weten. Bovendien doen de presentatoren onderling erg amicaal en noemen elkaar nadrukkelijk bij de naam, alsof zij samen de gelukkige elite vormen die door persoonlijke kwaliteiten de onwetende luisteraar moet verlichten.
Dankzij de methode van de media krijgt de massa de indruk alsof elke mening gelijkwaardig is. Voor elke uitspraak is wel iemand te vinden die het tegendeel beweert. Door dit schema komen Geert Wilders (de gebleekte Indo) en Rita Verdonk (de domme cipier) met de regelmaat van de klok als volwaardige deskundigen aan het woord, terwijl ze aantoonbaar nooit iets aan de oplossing van welk probleem dan ook hebben bijgedragen. De regisseur beslist zelf wat nieuwswaarde is, dus wat wij moeten denken en hij baseert zich op wat hij denkt dat we denken. Wat hij zelf niet begrijpt kan hij niet denken, geen wonder dat hij of zij zo'n voorkeur heeft voor arrogante idioten en dat die niet van het beeld of de luidspreker weg te slaan zijn.
De foutjes in de IPCC-rapporten vormen een laatste editie van deze potsierlijke tragedie die 'het nieuws' heet. Alle klimaatsceptici zijn inmiddels weer aan de beurt geweest. Als het nog langer duurt moeten journalisten weer het platteland af op zoek naar verborgen talent. Want dat heb je wel nodig voor kritische journalistiek. We nemen geen waarheden aan, we vragen door. Zou het niet kunnen dat de hele milieubeweging een samenzwering is van linkse krachten? Er zijn mensen die dat denken en iedereen is gelijk, alles is maar een mening. Vast, laten we de Hummer maar alvast bestellen!
De filosoof Jean Baudrillard had het goed gezien: er is geen verschil meer tussen verzinsel en feit. Het loopt allemaal door elkaar. Meneer Van Zon (op zaterdag) en Jeroen Wielaert zijn beide echte schertsfiguren, dus lach erom met een gerust hart. In de humor zit misschien wel meer waarheid dan in de ernst.
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