Of course, that explains the woeful state of AmeriKa's newspapers.
"The Hollywoodization of Wall Street" by Neal Gabler | April 23, 2009
.... How times have changed. The recent reports of Wall Street's own excesses - private planes, lavish parties, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, and customized limousines - all sound like pure Hollywood. And that might not be coincidental. Though America's captains of finance have been pilloried for their greed and though the financial collapse has been attributed to avarice, the collapse may actually have had less to do with greed per se than with a certain mindset that seems to have been adopted by Wall Street from Hollywood. In short, you can blame the Hollywoodization of Wall Street for our economic woes....
Hollywood, as a community, was a mythological place - a kind of faraway magical kingdom. It was where stars shone brightly, where wealth abounded, where glamour was the rule, where everything was larger than life, and where nothing exceeded like excess. Boring it wasn't. It provided temptation precisely because its values seemed so alien from the typical American small-town virtues that, ironically, Hollywood movies often touted. It was as if the twain - Hollywood's exoticism and our quotidian reality - could never meet.
But something happened over the last 25 years of general prosperity, media saturation, and increasing mobility. Hollywood stealthily became a paradigm for American success and not just an extreme example of it. Americans began to aspire to be like Hollywood, and ordinary people came to dress like stars, talk like stars, act like stars, in some cases even live like stars. Gossip magazines and movies themselves were primers on how to close the gap between them and us. We began to measure success by the standards of Hollywood - by how much you could flaunt your wealth, by how much publicity you could attract, by how much power you could exude - because those were the standards we saw daily....
WTF is he talking about? This guy is actually BLAMING the PUBLIC for the IMMORALITY and FILTH that comes from Hollywood and then blaming that on the bankers' looting? The rank elitism is really something to behold, isn't it?
In movies, perception is reality. The whole job of the movies, after all, is creating illusions that seem real and that have the same impact as reality. The trick is in making the illusions credible enough to captivate the audience -- perception as reality.
That's how, in a country of dreamers where everyone seemed bedazzled by illusions, American finance became a giant special effect. Ponzi schemes like Madoff's, and the invention of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other complicated financial instruments that even economic experts acknowledge they do not understand, were Wall Street's answer to Hollywood - vast illusions of wealth that were maintained through smoke and mirrors. Just as Hollywood got caught up in the blockbuster mentality, Wall Street was besotted by its own cascades of money....
When we go to the movies, we eventually leave the theater, usually to find ourselves disenchanted by the reality outside....
I couldn't agree more on that.
Now we have all left the financial theater, and we are all disenchanted. The responsibility is the bankers' ....
If I type that I'm some sort of anti-semite, right?
But the lesson is Hollywood's - that in America we pay the price for not being able to distinguish airy dreams from earthbound reality, glamour from common sense.
And for believing and accepting 9/11 lies.
--more--"
Here is the biggest nightmare going, world.
An interesting summary of the State Department’s Philip Zelikow, who was Executive Director on the 9-11 Commission, that greatest of all charades. According to Wikipedia:
"Prof. Zelikow’s area of academic expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, 'public myths’ or 'public presumptions’ which he defines as 'beliefs (1) thought to be true ( although not necessarily known with certainty) and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.’ In his academic work and elsewhere he has taken a special interest in what he has called 'searing’ or 'molding’ events (that) take on transcendent’ importance and therefore retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene….He has noted that 'a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make the connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all." ("Thinking about Political History" Miller center Report, winter 1999, p 5-7)
Isn’t that the same as saying there is neither history nor truth; that what is really important is the manipulation of epochal events so they serve the interests of society’s managers? Thus, it follows that if the government can create their own "galvanizing events", then they can write history any way they choose."
