Everything is Illuminated

Today is Media Day.

My post is dedicated to the people and industries that tell us how to live. These people package products, inform us about the world near and far, and elucidate issues that we must care about.

These people have dream jobs somewhere where jingles and graphics create a dream-like feeling of a perfect life. They are magic makers.

The fog is slipping in from the ocean and my mind is still in dreamland.

I'm reminiscing about my first job, in Hollywood. People came in the costume shop where my best friend asked me to help during Halloween. I was not going to any party; I could help people chose their costumes and prepare to live it up and pretend for a night. Everybody worked in some dream job, I thought, creating movies and producing magazines. Even our neighbors had dream jobs, working at Disneyland in the summer months, showing the Monsanto Home, the better and healthier home of the future. Life and chemistry helped by media savvy publicists and dream weavers.

I move through my day as though I have a programmed battery. I make Starbuck 's coffee now, not Maxwell House; I must have my macchiato before I open my eyes.

Martha Stewart chose the linens for my bed, until I heard about her big lie. Ethan Allen furnished the rest of the bedroom, and my lake view is courtesy of mother nature. My picture on my profile, all my pictures are mine, chosen and shot by me. The only exceptions are the award graphics, courtesy of a blog friend with media skills. These awards are passed out in blogland.

Without newspapers, television, advertisers, lobbyists, without the hoopla people and the picture people, and the p.r. people, and the publicists- without media we would all be still in the middle ages.

I knew a time without daily papers, radio, television. The only people who had any news of the world were the few people who could afford to buy the paper that was delivered to our small town from the big metropolis nearby. When radios became available in every household, after electricity, it immediately became a sinful escape for everyone. The entire family gathered around its twinkling lights, as father fussed with the dial across the screen trying to get a station that could be heard without static or other interference.

With the arrival of radio, information and entertainment personalities became magnets. Nobody knew more than those disembodied voices on the radio.

We followed their advice.

WE still do.

Television, radio, movies, the Internet, are our modern cathedrals, illuminating stories of New Heaven and Precipitous Hell.

We all participate as consumers and producers of these stories,

WE are all manipulating and being manipulated.

We are all in this dream/nightmare together.

Tonight, after I watch Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow and Steven Colbert, mixing up with news with entertainment, switching channels a hundred times before settling on BBC news or CNN or MSNBC, or Fox, I'll retire to read The New Yorker, or the New York Times on line. Around me, close bye, I can google for information around the world, read posts in blogland that might illuminate a condition I don't understand.

Will I be safe? Will my retirement savings last me? Is my insurance up to date? How do I know? How do I separate nights and days, real and manufactured? I know I'm fuzzy headed and on medications this week. Will I feel better if I didn't take meds?

I used to trust the Pope and my president to tell me the truth. I used to trust my doctors to give only the medicines I needed. Now, I know less and I trust even less.