NBC Puts On 2-Week Commercial for US Power

[malaise]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0212-20.htm
<snip>
Great article by Pierre Tristam
About half the readers of this site are from outside the United States, which means that among those of you who chose to watch the Olympics’ opening ceremonies from Turin Friday, about half of you were lucky enough not to be subjected to NBC’s nauseating production. But I’m not so sure you should count your blessings. Watching an American production of a world sporting event these days may be embarrassing. It is simplistic. It is supremacist. It is promotional to the core. But it is also instructive. NBC covers the Olympics the way American neocons do foreign policy: The world is 95 percent America, 3 percent water, and 2 percent everything else. America’s projection onto the world is mostly as an emblem of force, preferably unrivaled. What world does exist outside its borders is reduced to elementary-school simplicities (“1.3 billion Chinese!” and how to say Turin in Italian). Above all, it’s reduced to the presumption that the rest of the world is either a by-stander, an enabler or a threat to American hegemony—what America’s Republicans, who have more in common with Charles DeGaulle than with Abraham Lincoln, would call American greatness (even as that greatness is right now pulling an Algerian rug from under its booted feet, with Iraqi weaving). That’s how NBC projects its Olympic coverage

[Jara sang]

1. All you have to do is watch U.S. military recruiting commercials.

There is one where the U.S. Navy uses the billion dollar Aegis system to target a fly. That says it all right there. K&R

[Jara sang]

2. dupe delete

dupe

[skooooo]

3. Nature of the beast...

:shrug:

EVERY country does this with the Olympics. There are bigger problems, imo.