The Glass Teat justifies state Terrorism.

  "24" turned me off.  Totally!  It also  made crystal clear,   the creation of  justified torture. Produced by Murdoch's Fox TV, it was not a surprise.    That we now have a new  demonisation process  playing out its ugly,  brainwashing game  is , again , no surprise.   Hollywood created  and sold Demonisations  are the ugly reality of  "popular" infotainment. The Glass Teat terrorises and justifies  State led Terrorism. 


 The Muslims Are Coming … No, They Are Here

Phew. Where to start? How about with the positive. If there is any, it has to do with the fact that while two of the show’s key writers hail from Fox’s 24, the series that right after 9/11 allowed Americans to vicariously torture Muslims every week through the broadly drawn everyman hero Jack Bauer, that show’s conservative producer,Joel Surnow (friend of Rush Limbaugh), is nowhere in the credits. Homeland is written by a committee of older writers who do not appear to have the right-wing impulses of 24.

As a result, there is some effort to suggest that drone strikes that kill innocent civilians can create blowback, and that the government is taking full liberty (no pun intended) with the Patriot Act and is spying on everyone, all of the time.

None of this ever happens in the so-called “real world.” Remember, aside from Richard Reid, the “underwear bomber,” and the doughnut who tried to blow up a car on Times Square, all of the big busts of so-called terrorists have been sting operations in which the FBI used informants to suck vulnerable jihadist wannabes from mostly poor neighborhoods into fake plots using phony weapons. The closest the government has gotten to exposing a “cell” was nabbing a used car salesman who was supposedlyplanning to kill the Saudi ambassador by enlisting the aid of Mexican drug goons. He never got further than the mailbox. Not exactly Nazir and a truck load of dynamite.

Plus the critics love Homeland. It’s not the first to dramatize real events and caricature the enemy for the sake of entertainment: James Bond did it all through the Cold War and is still doing it.




It’s time to find another enemy to kick around on television. That’s why I liked the X-Files, where the real monsters were the federal government and E.T. A lot of time they were one in the same. Sounds about right. But those times are gone. Now Hollywood thrives on the dichotomy of mostly good (government) and all evil (Muslims). It’s the enemy we know, or at least the one Hollywood writes for us.