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I first alluded to the paradigm shift all of us need to make including the media in my Archimedes Manifesto. On
this page, I have links to the Ashland Newspaper with unbiased coverage and information on health care. I will be expanding
this site, but currently I am including comments by Marshall McLuhan and Bill Moyers on the media. Marshall
McLuhan's book, "Understanding the Media" in 1964 was prophetic and profound. Bill Moyers is one of my
heroes who tells the truth.
From Marshall McLuhan...."Understanding the Media
ARCHIMEDES Archimedes
once said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the world." Today he would have pointed
to our electric media and said, "I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will
move in any tempo or pattern I choose." We have leased these "places to stand" to private
corporations.
Marshall McLuhan 1964
Literate
Man
Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to
cosmic patterns as tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less
inclined to accept his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house-or any other of the media of communication, for
that matter-as a ritual extension of his body .Once men have adopted the visual dynamic of the phonetic alphabet, they begin
to lose the tribal man's obsession with cosmic order and ritual as recurrent in the physical organs and their social extension.
Indifference to the cosmic, however, fosters intense concentration on minute segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique
strength of Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
Marshall McLuhan, Tzu-Gung As Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his
vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel
of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager.
Tzu-Gung said. "There is a
way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would
you not like to hear of it?" Then the gardener stood up, looked at him
and said, "And what would that be?" Tzu-Gung replied,
"You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly
that it just gushes out. This is called a draw- well."
Then anger rose up in the old man's face and he said, "1 have heard my teacher say that whoever
uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who
carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings
of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that
I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."
Bill Moyers He is a man who
speaks the truth, and whom I admire tremendously. I have some brief quotations of his speech in January,
2007 to National Conference for Media Reform Text of Bill Moyers speech in January, 2007 Video, part I, of this speech Video, part II
QUOTATIONS: His
speech was a metaphor of the Big Media controlling the people on the plantation (which is all of us who are the subjects of
the Media, as Afro Americans were the subjects of the Plantation owners!!!)
“So if we need to know what
is happening, and Big Media won’t tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and Big Media won’t tell us; if
we need to know what to do about it, and Big Media won’t tell us, it’s clear what we have to do. We have to tell
the story ourselves.
And this is what the plantation owners feared most of all. Over all those decades here in
the South, when they used human beings as chattel, and quoted scripture to justify it, property rights over human rights was
God’s way, they secretly lived in fear that one day — instead of saying, “Yes, Massa” — those
gaunt, weary, sweat-soaked field hands, bending low over the cotton under the burning sun, would suddenly stand up straight,
look around, see their sweltering and stooping kin and say, “This ain’t the product of intelligent design. The
boss man in the big house has been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system.”
This is the moment
freedom begins, the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story, and it’s time you took the pen from
his hand and started writing it yourself.” In this speech, he later quoted a poem of Marge Piercy: What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with
electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child,
wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t blame them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break
a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can
play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand
have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own
media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to
act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each
day you mean one more.
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