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3/24/03:

Cinema Olympia

A good friend from back home told me that demonstrations in Chicago are growing with each event - blocking Lakeshore Drive, constant presence of police in riot gear, arrests, some violence. I tried to find some info on what happened last Sunday but, not-so-surprisingly the local papers are a bit thin on the coverage.

A quick perusal of the headlines from back home does bring up this analysis on
war and images. It'll be interesting to see what the rhetoric is like when I get back.

Here the news is just as saturated with coverage of the war, last week sharing equal time with stories about a former president's assasination. The titles for the television coverage are usually something like Guerra de Bush and the journalism angles centre everything around the administration. There are the usual infrared camera images, detailed diagrams of weaponry and all those other uncanny abstractions.

But I've also seen lots of horrid images of Iraqi hospitals, refugees, decimated neighbourhoods and wonder if those same pictures show up on CNN and Fox News. Lots of images of increasingly violent demonstrations show up too. I can't recall whether or not I've seen individual protesters interviewed, but I wonder if the US coverage still takes the same ridiculous tack of finding only the most hyperbolic comments, or most violent images and letting those stand for the intentions of the rest of the thousands. There's lots of hyperbole around here too. Another American friend and I marched in a protest downtown last week and were amused by the same tired Che Guevara shirts and Anarchy patches, or pictures of Bush with a Hitler moustache.

My inability to understand the slogans affirmed the point of demonstrations - one that you'll never understand if you only see the images - that all those thousands of people are talking to each other the entire time. When the marches are peaceful, ideas are being shared; idealistic, intelligent, and oftentimes optimistic people are talking and acting. I learn more from the people I walk against than any umbrella of media saturation.

It is strangely unexpected culture shock to have all this information reduced to salient images and a few key words, not being able to say more than Eu n?o gosto George Bush or understand the nuances of the highly animated conversations blurted out around the TV where I live.

posted by jeremy @ 3:53 PM