like i have time for this

but i watched Orwell Rolls in His Grave tonight. i'm not sure what to think. it's not terribly exciting. it made me grind my teeth in frustration and a deep sense of futility. i'm really glad i watched it. b and i talked extensively about it after we watched it. both of us got on soapboxes and decided to move to new zealand. but we won't. that's not even the right thing to do, necessarily. the right thing to do seems to be to ignore news. just ignore it. take the kernals of important stuff--pope john paul's death, etc.--and then turn off the damn tv. is there anything really worth spending time on anyway? as far as entertainment goes, i suppose it's no better and no worse than anything else. but i sympathize with those that don't even own a tv. in a one hour time-block, what can you possibly get that you couldn't get some other way, possibly a more constructive way? sure, you get attached to characters. we watched the whole series of "freaks and geeks" and i have to say that it was one of the best things i've ever seen. better than most movies even. so i guess i'm not saying that watching movies (which i absolutely love) is better or somehow more justifiable than tv. but movies seem to be richer--they can, though they don't always, say something more substantial than a tv show. but i'm conflating too many issues here. the documentary we watched tonight was specifically alerting us to the fact that almost all entertainment and news in the U.S. is owned by 5 companies, that those companies even influence our government to make decisions that favor them, and consequently most media leans toward the political interests of these 5 companies. given that these companies are extraordinarily wealthy entities, the legislation they influence typically favors deregulation (allowing them to become even bigger and more powerful) and lower taxes (so their money stays with them instead of going toward tax revenue). on top of that, the rhetoric that the media has a "liberal bias" has become commonplace even though, against all logic, all 5 CEOs of the media giants are dyed-in-the-wool anti-liberals (not morally....morally, they're "anything goes"--sex sells and regulation of crass materialism is bad for business). alright. i meant for this to be a shorter post. sorry. see the movie. then let's start thinking about how to combat this trend in and through our own lives.