Double Flee A

At work today, I am hounded by the recent memory of the video of Lil' Markie, which is basically a stage name for a guy named Mark Fox. I can hear the song ringing in my memory's special frequent-replay RAM cache, whose specific job is to hold all annoying songs at the ready. Boulevard of broken dreams by green day, The national cornbread festival theme song, The song that never ends, these are the neighbors of Lil' Markie's latest stain on my neurons.

Rather than forcefully expurge myself of the awfulness like the main character at the end of the (otherwise) horrible Aranovsky picture "Pi", I take some sage advice and make a friend of my enemy, thereby destroying him. So I sank deep into my thoughts on the subject of Mark Fox, and in about ten seconds of not fighting the madness, came to a conclusion. Mark Fox, all televised preachers (and lots of other preachers), and hypersuccessful pituitary white guy Anthony Robbins have in common that they're just entertainers. What they offer is essentially just entertainment.

Out of three functions of media, and there may be more, but out of informing, educating, and entertaining, sermonizing is much more about entertainment than it is either of the other two. You can tell this because in the course of these guys doing their jobs nobody learns very much, and their feelings get very involved. One teaching that preachers and motivational speakers do offer is how to get your feelings to respond, but they bill themselves as more or less indispensable, and that masks their real function. They aren't magicians, they're shysters, and their livelihoods rely on the general public, or at least their consumers, not understanding what they really do.

posted by dale @ 3:02 PM