"A long time ago, teachers and students in Tibet considered
themselves artists of reality. They practiced inventing it. And then,
separating themselves from every other spiritual system, they practiced
destroying what they created. Back and forth, back and forth, with the
goal of achieving an intimate knowledge of their own existence." (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
For the early Tibetan adepts, the Void was a vital concept.
Stripped
of its metaphysical baggage and embroidery, Void was the place where
creating stopped. The constant "noise of existence" went away.
The ongoing parade of inner thoughts, sentiments, propensities---vanished.
For as long as a person wanted to stay there. And experience the greatest "vacation" he'd ever known. If he could handle it.
But humans felt a great need to avoid the Void. They demanded activity, flow, information.
They eventually sank to the level of passivity...and then they simply wanted input, more input, and still more input.
From an authoritative unimpeachable external source.
Hence, from the earliest societies onward, there was a thing called: the news.
It was updated. It was ongoing. It was forever.
Priests delivered it. Kings delivered it. Their minions delivered it.
If the news stopped, people felt anxiety, which, at bottom, was a fear of Void.
There
is much more to say about the Tibetans and their understanding of Void
and its twin, ongoing Creation, but I'll save that for another time.
Now, in these times, the global population has television news.
The
imitations of life called anchors are the arbiters. How they speak, how
they look, how they themselves experience emotion---all this is planted
deep in the minds of the viewers.
Much of the world can't imagine the evening news could look and sound any other way.
That's how solid the long-term brainwashing is.
The
elite anchors, from John Daly, in the early days of television, all the
way to Lester Holt and Scott Pelley, have set the style. They define
the genre.
The anchor taps into, and mimics, that part of the
audience's psyche that wants smooth delivery of superficial cause and
effect. (In the Void, of course, cause and effect dissolve.)
The network anchor is the
wizard of Is.
He keeps explaining what is. "Here's something that is, and then over
here we have something else that is, and now, just in, a new thing that
is." He lays down miles of
"is-concrete" to pave over deeper, uncomfortable truth.
Ultimately, he is paving over Void.
On air, the anchor is neutral, a castratus, a eunuch.
This
is a time-honored ancient tradition. The eunuch, by his diminished
condition, has the trust of the ruler. He guards the emperor's inner
sanctum. He acts as a buffer between his master and the people. He
applies the royal seal to official documents.
All expressed
shades of emotion occur and are managed within that persona of the
dependable court eunuch. The anchor who can move the closest to the line
of being human without actually arriving there is the champion. These
days, it was, until his downfall, Brian Williams.
The vibrating
string between eunuch and human is the frequency that makes an anchor
great. Think Cronkite, Chet Huntley, Edward R Murrow. Huntley was a just
a touch too masculine, so they teamed him up with David Brinkley, a
medium-boiled egg. Brinkley supplied twinkles of comic relief.
There
are other reasons for "voice-neutrality" of the anchor. Neutrality
conveys a sense of science. "We did the experiment in the lab and this
is how it turned out."
Television news is really all segue all the time. That's what it comes down to.
The word "segue," pronounced "segway," refers to a transition from one thing to another, a blend.
Ed
McMahon once referred to Johnny Carson as the prince of blends, because
Carson could tell a clunker of a joke, step on it three times, and
still move to the next joke without losing his audience.
Television news is very serious business. A reporter who can't handle segues is dead in the water. He's a gross liability.
The good anchors can take two stories that have no connection whatsoever and create a sense of smooth transition.
Brian
Williams could say, "The planes were recalled later in the
afternoon...And a man was cut in two in a horrific accident in Idaho
today...And in Seattle (smile), three people reported seeing turtles
falling from the sky."
And it works. The segue works. The blends from one story to another seem reasonable somehow.
The
networks basically have, on a daily basis, radically fragmented
stories, and they need an anchor who can do the blends, the segues, and
get away with it, to promote the sense of one continuous flow. So the
audience doesn't say, "This is just an odd collection of surreal
moments, this is Salvador Dali on my television screen."
The news
is all segue all the time. The voice of the anchor is the non-stop
blending machine that ties all news stories together. That's why the
elite network stars earn their paychecks.
It's often been said of
certain actors, "He could read from the phone book and you'd listen."
Well, an elite anchor can hold the viewer's mind as he reads a sentence
from the phone book, another one from a car-repair manual, a third from a
cookbook, and a fourth from a funeral-home brochure. Without stopping.
And afterward, the viewer would have no questions.
The
news is surreal because the stories are mostly fool's gold to begin
with; and they're unrelated. They're rocks lying around. The anchor
picks them up and invents the illusion of One Flowing Stream.
This
is what the audience wants. The news feels like a story. It feels like
unity. It feels like a stage play or a movie. It feels, when all is said
and done, good.
You can't pull just anyone off the street and
have him describe car crashes, murders, storms, threats of war,
political squabbles, 300 cats living in a one-room apartment, a new
piece of Medicare legislation, genitalia picture tweets, and the
dedication of a new library, while keeping the audience in a light
trance.
Katie Couric couldn't do it. People were waiting for her
to break out into an attack of Perky and giggle and cross her legs.
Diane Sawyer had her bad nights. She seemed to be affecting somber
personal grief as her basic segue-thread. Scott Pelley is competent,
but he has his off-moments, too, when he's suddenly sitting like a
surgeon ready to signal the anesthesiologist to clamp a mask on your
face, before he cuts into your stomach.
Whereas, a true and authentic version of the news would go something like this: "Well, folks,
just now
I moved from a tornado in Kansas to the removal of restrictions on
condom sales, and I'm blending directly into penguins in Antarctica. I'm
doing Salvador Dali and you're not noticing a thing."
The anchor
is basically saying to the audience, "I'm a few feet inside your
personal landscape, your mind, feeding you all the turns in the river,
and I'll always be here...papering over the Void."
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