Michael, McLuhan and the mob

I'm not immune to pop culture and I'm not a bigot like Peter King or Bill O'Reilly it's just that I've spent most of my time with jazz. The funerary arrangements for Michael Jackson have been pretty over the top and the mob in front of the Staples Center reminded me of the final scene in Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust" (but not so apocalyptic). Actually it was my fellow Edmontonian Marshall McLuhan, the electronic age guru, who said that it isn't the content of the television that's important, it's the audience. At least that was his comment on the first moon landing. The bathos (Oxford dictionary: unintential lapse in mood from the sublime to the absurd or trivial) went on and on. In an Updike poem titled "TV" he said that he turned on the tap of TV but it didn't come out hot or cold, only lukewarm and tepid".
Adman Jerry Mander's book "Four arguments for the elimination of television" is worth reading in this tv saturated age. Briefly the arguments are: 1. The mediation of experience, 2. The colonization of experience, 3. The effects of television on the human being and 4. The inherent biases of television. The funeral show was put on like a giant biblical epic, as per DeToqueville's comment that the most prevalent trait he found in America was "religious insanity". But this is the age of footage and man did they have the footage. There's nothing in the archives on the death of Mozart or Napolean. To digress, did you know that Johann Strauss II composed "The morning papers waltz"? Isn't that nice? Couldn't there be a lovely "Waltz of the Anchors"? A tv reporter once asked Milton Berle for a comment and Miltie declined. The reporter said, can't we get something and Miltie said, "Just say film at 11."