Myth and Meaning in Stephen O'Connor's Ziggurat

Certain themes run through most mythologies - themes that transcend culture, country and religion. From the story of the Tower of Babel to the hubris of Oedipus; from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, to the myth of Beowulf and Grendel, we seem to like stories about people confronting forces that are greater than they are.

Recurring anxieties underlie many of our mythologies: how can we answer unanswerable questions if we are the most powerful and intelligent agents in our world? And if we're not the most powerful and intelligent agents in our world, then what, if anything, is greater than us; and if such an entity exists - how do we conquer, confront or understand it?

Stephen O'Connor has just published a story In the June 29, 2009 issue of The New Yorker called Ziggurat. The ziggurat is a Mesopotamian pyramid with steps leading upwards to the pinnacle and steps leading downward on all sides; the structure of O'Connor's story seems to be based on just this type of architecture.

The story begins with an unnamed girl sitting in a rec room playing video games while a Minotaur watches her by the pool table. Everything in the first paragraph has the aspect of gaming: there are the video games on the computer (a world of its own), the pool table, and finally the Labyrinth where the Minotaur encounters the girl. The reader isn't sure immediately what's game and what's setting.

This is the first act of the story, where Minotaur and girl play a zero-sum game - a game where each dances curiously around the other. The girl doesn't understand why the Minotaur doesn't eat her; she's been resignedly expecting him to do just that; the Minotaur, for his part, hasn't encountered a victim quite as resigned as this girl before, which is why he's hesitant to eat her; the only option remaining for them is to form a friendship.

When the Minotaur asks her about the video games she's playing, she describes them as "disappointment games." Even her favorite, "Ziggurat," a game re-enacting the building of Babel, is a disappointment game:

"You're supposed to build the Tower of Babel up before God knocks it down."

This is essentially the game she's playing with the Minotaur. The Minotaur believes he is the largest and most powerful agent in his environment; by the end of the story he will be almost minuscule, but he will also be profoundly changed by his relationship with this girl.

O'Connor's story borrows freely from familiar myths to construct this highly unusual (especially for The New Yorker) story about learning humility and empathy. Before the girl's appearance Minotaur's murders have no moral resonance with him one way or the next. He gets hungry and so he eats; simple as that. (Except for the fact that he's "the agent of his own appetite") But after she disappears his vocabulary expands. He begins to understand loss, shame, joylessness and regret. The Minotaur is becoming more and more like the humans he used to disdain. This is when the Minotaur attempts to build his own Tower of Babel. Does this desire to know more of his world come from the girl's suggestion that there is a possibility of escape? Who is the blue-faced man, and why does he seem to have power over the Minotaur? Is there some force beyond the Minotaur more powerful than he is? This mythological possibility of another world becomes the apex of the story; he builds a ziggurat, only to find himself in a world of plaster - everything from here on out will only serve to prove just how small he is.

O'Connor's a very effective writer, although sometimes his prose comes across as a little quaint and cutesy, especially his repetitive use of onomatopoeia:

"She didn’t even glance away from the screen. Just: twitch, twitch, twitch, clickity-clackity-click, click-click-click. “Oof !” she would say. “Oh, my God!”

To me, this kind of prose is highly distracting, though I suppose another reader might find it fun and charming - disarming, even, which I assume is how O'Connor intends it. There are also moments where O'Connor's choppy sentences and his odd insistence on beginning sentences with conjunctions also distract. These are small issues, however, with an otherwise engaging and thought provoking story, that I'm sure I'll be thinking about for a while.

Glee Club Blues

There's no shortage of artists proclaiming the death of their art form. Only a few weeks ago, a friend of mine who works in the theater bemoaned its current state: "It's not relevant anymore," he said. "The only reason people go to theater these days is so they have someplace they can take a date and get laid." He was being facetious, of course, but the statement reveals the anxiety many people in the theater have about the relevance of the work they do, especially in this increasingly digital/video driven age. The irony is that critics are declaring 2009 as the most vital year for theater in years. Of course this is in reference to the big Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, like Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin and "Twelfth Night" at the Delacorte.

Where are the vital, engaging, new and edgy Off-Off Broadway productions, and what place do they play in our society today?

This weekend I saw the final performance of Blue Coyote Group's "Glee Club." (Written by Matthew Freeman,and Directed by Kyle Ancowitz) It was the first theater production I've seen this year -unusual for me, because in the past three years not only have I seen a lot of theater, but I worked in the theater, and reviewed theater productions as well. The play was a part of The Anti-Depressant Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have worked with Blue Coyote before, and the director of "Glee Club," is an old friend of mine. That said, I found this production to be a vital, fun, interesting and even important play, and beneath its fun, it underscores the anxiety and ambivalence a lot of artists feel about the work they're doing today.

The play is about a group of singers - the Romeo, Vermont Glee Club - practicing for a performance coming up that Saturday at an old folks home. The play casts a colorful cast of oddballs and ne'er-do-wells: Greg, whose cancer has been in remission for fifteen years, and who insists all the same he's liable to die from it any day; Paul, a psychopath who occasionally quips in with creepy non-sequitors; Stan, the moralist of the play - an alcoholic who is awaiting his rock-bottom moment; and the star of the Glee Club, their best singer Hank, an alcoholic who actually has hit rock bottom and managed to get off the sauce and get himself to AA meetings. The group is run by Ben, a petulant perfectionist who eerily reminded me of the group leader of the Chevy Chase children's choir, when I used to sing for them in performances with the Paul Hill Chorale. Every single one of the actors does a stellar and completely convincing job; moreover they keep us delighted and entertained throughout, even as we shake our heads at their moral fiber - or lack thereof.

The great dilemma of the play centers around Hank's recovery. Ever since he stopped drinking, his voice hasn't been the same. Most of the members of the Glee Club either state outright they want him to start drinking again, or skirt around the suggestion, in hopes that he eventually will; it's a tension that translates to the audience: the song they are to perform(music and lyrics written by Stephen Speights) is constantly interrupted throughout the performance by Ben's impatience with the singers, leaving the audience anxious to hear the entirety of it - an impossibility, we soon realize, if Hank does not start drinking again.

For these singers, everything is at stake, and nothing is at stake. What matter if a completely unknown Glee Club in Romeo, Vermont gives a mediocre performance? Then again, the very existence of the Glee Club may depend upon a successful performance. (their sole sponsor will be part of the audience Saturday)The relationship between the singers is caustic at its worst, and superficial at its best - and yet it's all any of them have. Is this performance really worth the life of one of its members? Is successful art and questionable camaraderie really worth the levels of moral degradation these singers subject themselves to?

The answer, of course, is no; and yet it's not a question the audience is really at liberty to ask. The play is a play of relationships and decisions - and each of the singers must make his own decision about what the work, the team and their relationships to each other mean, and what worth they have, if any. Suffice it to say, when the ensemble finally finished performing the song at the end of the show, the audience greeted it with ecstatic applause.

A Few Words for Michael

Not much today, as the world mourns the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson. Michael didn't mean to me what he meant to some people, but growing up as a kid in the eighties he was ubiquitous. I remember, as an awkward black kid in a mostly-white school, wearing a black and red "Beat It" shirt, and the jibes that come with that kind of thing when you're young: "Hey, Timothy, do like your shirt says, and beat it."

So, in some ways I identified with his weird outsider status, even though he was the King of Pop.

That got harder to reconcile as I got older. The accusations of pedophilia, the lightening of his skin, and his bizarre obsessions made him difficult to sympathize with. At the same time, there were his rebuffs: he wasn't a pedophile, he was being exploited for his wealth, fame and strangeness; he wasn't lightening his skin to be more white, he suffered from vitiligo. For someone just watching the media bounce the accusations and rebuffs back and forth, it was hard to hold judgement. Anyone who's a little strange knows that others will be quick to take advantage of that strangeness to turn others against you. On the other hand, who knew what to think? Just because one strange person is victimized, doesn't mean another strange person can't victimize others.

Michael Jackson lived a very unusual life, to say the least, and as sad as his death is, he was never the one to grow into an old man. One can only hope he didn't victimize other children the way his father, the media and the institution that is the music industry victimized him as a child. "Man hands misery onto man," Philip Larkin tells us, and yes, that's true; on the other hand, for the short time we're here on this planet, the most we can strive for is to hand down something of our greater lights as well.

I grew up in the hip-hop era, a black kid who unselfconsciously listened to punk and goth. Michael struggled with his racial identity all his life; but he broke black music into MTV; he was a crossover artist who made it easier for the rest of us not to have to same identity struggles he went through. At the end of the day all we have or know of an artist (unless we know them personally) is the work, and our relationship to it. Michael may not mean as much to me as he means to others, but at the same time, he may mean more to me than I realize.

On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America Part II

Last night, reading through Cynthia Ozick's book of essays, "Quarrel & Quandary" I came across the following passage in her essay on "Public Intellectuals:"

"Thinkers... are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence. "I have seen the enemy and he is us" is not always and everywhere true; and self-blame can be the highest form of self-congratulation. People who are thinkers are obliged to respect exigency and to admit to crisis."

This is what I was getting at yesterday when I argued that understanding often leads us to accept compromises as unreasonable as the compromises Booker T. Washington asks of the freed blacks. It has become politically correct recently for us to reject the idea of absolute evil; and yet absolute evil exists, and has always existed; and coming to "an understanding" of evil is nothing less than making a deal with the devil.

Before this is taken in a strictly religious way, I think it's necessary for us to establish a definition of evil. The problem with doing that involves setting up moral absolutes, and any time someone goes about the task of setting up moral absolutes, they find themselves in a quandary: how do you establish a moral absolute when so many previous attempts to do so have only been the misunderstandings between cultures? Christianity found evil in the heathen religious and spiritual practices of the first African slaves; no doubt the African slaves found evil in the colonists who enslaved them. Who was the more evil, absolutely? Pederasty is an absolute evil, no doubt; and yet, the Ancients Greeks - the first lights of our culture - practiced it openly and joyously. Were they as a society evil - and only those, like Plato, who practiced chaste pederasty absolved from this evil? Is it really possible to completely understand both points of view? The moment we begin talking about absolutes, it seems the conversation ceases, and there's only anger, misunderstanding and resentment left in its place.

And yet, we have to talk about absolutes, because we are social creatures, and have to live within societies of others, and live within the absolute rules of those societies.

When African slaves were dragged into the American colonies, we have to wonder about the mindset of the slave masters: On the one hand, DuBois informs us, these slave masters were only too happy to introduce Christianity to these pagans; but if they were happy to do this, then they must have been open to the fact that these were human beings with souls that could be saved like any European soul.

For these Christian colonists, submitting to the pagan religions of their slaves would have been an absolute evil; and yet isn't it more evil for these Christians to introduce these pagans to a religion that so brazenly touts its own hypocrisy? It would have been better had the pagans never had to come to an understanding of these Christians at all, because the Christians, trapped in their culture of institutions, had built up a society that requires hypocrisy to function, and every one among them understood that, even if subconsciously. This to me, is evil: to (understandably) submit to a social system that forces one to act against one's principles; and since institutions are living things, but not human things, they demand individuals make sacrifices for them in order that they (the institutions)may survive; and yet they have no moral conscience.

Understanding between individual and individual is never an evil thing. DuBois gets at this when he writes:

"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars."

It is when man becomes involved in institutions that he becomes evil. DuBois writes of his own text in 1953, fifty years after it was first published: "But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort, even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men."

To my mind, institutions carry the germ of evil, and the larger they grow, the more they estrange man from man; and the more we come to accept and understand them, and others as agents of them, the more evil we grow. It's true that an individual can be truly evil on his own - but this is rare - and generally only true of the sociopath. Institutions, by their very design, are sociopathic entities.

On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America

Political essays are generally written for a writer's contemporaries. First and foremost, they are meant as urgent and pressing arguments. Well, suppose a political essay is successful, and a generation later, the general population has come to accept the author's point of view as self-evident? What are future readers to make of the work? Is it meant to have an afterlife?

Reading W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk," more than a hundred years after it was written, and in light of the current Obama Administration, the book has a curious resonance for the modern reader. DuBois' beautifully written series of essays reads, on the surface, as an impassioned call for the higher education of blacks, a call for political participation in the American democratic process by the race, and a rebuttal of the teachings of Booker T. Washington. For today's reader, these arguments feel, at first, definitively settled; but on close examination, there are other arguments hinted at in the book that feel startlingly contemporary and urgent; and as the book progresses through autobiography, social history, logical deconstruction, observation of contemporary life, fable and finally artistic analysis, interesting philosophical questions arise: for example, what is progress? How do we define the difference between progress and regress, and do societies actually progress at all, or is progress simply defined by the more powerful of two clashing societies?

The most urgent question for DuBois is that of education; for DuBois higher education is the means by which blacks lift "the Veil" – DuBois’ term for the mental and psychological block that keeps blacks from seeing themselves as truly free independent agents in an America where they have as much to offer as they have to learn. In this he disagrees strongly with Booker T. Washington, whose philosophy is summed up by the "Atlanta Compromise:" ("In all things purely social, we can be separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.") Booker T. Washington is willing to concede three things to white America in exchange for the opportunity for economic independence and growth:

“First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—"

These concessions are meant to allow blacks to "concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.”

Washington’s argument is strange to the contemporary reader. In fact, it’s downright nonsensical, and DuBois easily points out why: “Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No."

Obviously, if blacks are to survive in America, they must be allowed the same political, educational and civil opportunities afforded everyone else. Separate is inherently unequal. The question for the contemporary reader, then becomes, why would a free person want to integrate into American society? Certainly, for a race to survive in America, that race must have equality, but is Western High Culture or even the American Experiment something worth integrating into? It is a system which has had a long and brutal history of exploitation, hypocrisy and crime. Why would an American black want to become a part of this whitewashed world, except that at the moment there may be no other option?

“My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” DuBois says in the chapter titled, “The Meaning of Progess.” Because progress, as DuBois recognizes, means assimilating into a culture that is often hostile, hypocritical and given to rewarding the most cunning and deceptive individuals:

“To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States,—is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.”

But if the price of culture is a Lie, then what is gained from it? A person can’t live life behind a lie and be content; and here DuBois argues that the black soul is divided in two ways: the southern, more patient and pleasant temperament, and the angry, radical temperament found in the North:

“On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.”

This ultimately, is what DuBois, is attempting to do with his book, and it is his answer to the Lie of culture. DuBois wants to offer a means by which the races can live together harmoniously, honestly and with dignity, and for DuBois, that answer is through understanding and communication. When we look at how far we’ve come as a country, it’s easy to believe he was onto something. DuBois’ book has a mishmash of references to southern blues, European poetry, Greek theater, and then the lush descriptive passages of his own beautiful prose, which is so unique, personal, and born of both worlds that he could get one reviewer in 1903 from the New York Times to say: “To a Southerner who knows the negro race as it exists in the South, it is plain that this negro of Northern education is, after all, as he says, "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh" of the African race,” whereas another reviewer says in The American Review of Reviews: “Of the literary quality of the essays too much cannot be said. No book of similar character has been printed in recent years that equals this little volume in power or grace of expression.”

So this is what the American people should aspire to; where we are already headed, in fact, according to DuBois: we have already become something of each other through our unique history, and that’s only become more obvious over the last century. The sorrow songs DuBois discusses in the last chapter later gave way to blues, to jazz, to rock, and pretty much every other manifestation of modern American music; the parable of the two Johns in the chapter "Of the Coming of John," feels distinctly American, and even reappears in different form in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “Blood Meridian”; and of course, our common history of push and pull, of being neighbors and strangers, each other’s lovers and executioners within the same hour, has worked to make the contemporary American, here in what pundits now like to call our “post-racial” era, what he is.

With the election of President Barack Obama, half-black and half-white, a man who has been all over the world, known many cultures, and declares empathy is an important factor in deciding his supreme court nominee, haven’t we finally awakened to a world where we are no longer burdened by DuBois' “tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men”?

If a country with as blemished a history of racial division as ours can elect a black man to the highest office in the land, can’t we say we now know more of each other than ever? And that although progress is indeed an ugly process, it’s a necessary one, with ultimately beautiful results? And that progress definitely exists, just as the man who’s lifted the Veil goes through a trial by fire (Hate, Despair and Doubt, as DuBois beautifully illustrates in the story of Alexander Crummel) but comes out on the other side of it enlightened? “Life begins on the other side of despair,” according to Sartre, and isn’t this as true for the individual as it is for the society?

I’m not convinced. Understanding is a high virtue, and certainly some people come out on the other side of suffering better off; but just as often, understanding demands sacrifices every bit as unreasonable as the sacrifices Booker T. Washington asks of the freed slaves; because understanding often asks us to accept things as they are and not as they should be - and as much as we think we understand each other better the more our world globalizes, we should realize that the more our world globalizes, the larger our institutions grow; and the larger our institutions grow, the more disenfranchised man becomes from his fellow man. These are trials by fire which for some have no other side. In tomorrow's post I will attempt to explore the problems I see in DuBois' philosophy in the context of our modern world.

Requisite Manifesto-esque First Post

Video may have killed the radio star, and new media may be replacing old media, but the media as a social engine is alive and well, and more concerned with itself than ever. Sometime during the last decade or two, the focus of the media increasingly became - well - the media. We can see this trend in shows like NPR's "On the Media," popular television shows like, "Ugly Betty" and in recent Hollywood films like "Good Night and Good Luck" and "The Hoax." Is this new trend the result of the Internet – blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the like? It very well may be. In what has been dubbed, "The Age of the Amateur," anyone with an IP address can set up shop, and become a media outlet unto themselves. And why not? From the man on the soapbox in the town square, to the pamphleteer, to the graffiti artist, people have always had a desire to make themselves heard or seen by the masses; especially when they feel their ideas, opinions or culture are being ignored by the media at large.

But what is the media at large? Most of us talk about "the media" like we talk about "the government." It occupies some nebulous space somewhere out there that feeds the rest of us soundbites, articles, entertainment, and information; and until recently, it has mostly been disseminated by professionals. Of course the term professional is itself misleading, and arguably a construction of the old media. If by professional, we mean someone who is being paid to work in the media arts, then we have to admit, that before the age of the amateur, there was a direct correlation between professional media and commerce; and when information and commerce are inextricably linked, especially in a society like ours, where money exchange dictates worth, suddenly we're in danger of losing a lot of thoughtful readers. Or, as the case may be, thoughtful readers may decide to create their own media, which is exactly what has happened.

The immediacy and wide availability of Internet media has changed the way that our world operates. From the way that politics is run (case in point Obama's grassroots Internet presidential campaign or the YouTube debates this past primary season) to the way we handle our money (online banking, bill paying, PayPal accounts, eBay) to the way we consume our entertainment (between The Smoking Gun and Oprah, James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was judged more on the media surrounding it than on the book itself), it is almost impossible to discuss anything relevant to current affairs without including a discussion of the role the media, professional and amateur, is playing in the whole thing.

Well, they say hindsight is 20/20 and we should have seen this coming. It wasn't until the 1920's, notably the era of radio, that people started talking about "the media" in the pluralistic way we're so accustomed to now. The term media comes from the Latin word medius, and Merriam Webster breaks the definition down like this:

"The singular media and its plural medias seem to have originated in the field of advertising over 70 years ago; they are apparently still so used without stigma in that specialized field. In most other applications media is used as a plural of medium. The great popularity of the word in references to the agencies of mass communication is leading to the formation of a mass noun, construed as a singular."

With radio, in a way never before possible, people were suddenly exposed to the same information through the same medium at the same time. I don't think it's any coincidence that the advent of the radio in the first half of the 20th century coincides with the increasing interest in the use and the study of propaganda, and the coinage (by William H. Whyte in the March 1952 issue of Fortune Magazine) of the term "groupthink." When we're raised in a society where everyone gets their information on local, national and world events in politics, culture and the arts from corporate enterprises that have an interest in keeping the flood of information going in one direction – from the professionals to the people – it's no surprise that we end up creating a society in which "Groupthink is becoming a national philosophy," to quote Whyte's article.

Internet media, then, is in one sense a revolution against Groupthink. On the other I'd like to take it a bit further and suggest that Internet media and the rise of the amateur, while being on a very basic level a revolution against Groupthink philosophy, is actually being integrated into it in a way so subtle as to bamboozle us into thinking we're capable of moving beyond it, when actually we're buying into more than ever. Because, as we all know, the Internet can be its own hangman. Instead of detracting from the authority of the professionals, the Internet, with its endless labyrinths of wacky websites, half baked conspiracies, and outright disinformation, lends credence to the basic Groupthink philosophical premise that the distribution of information is best left in the hands of the professionals. Like an old history teacher used to tell me, whenever societies swing too far to the right or the left, they inevitably end up meeting in the middle.

The argument offered by old media apologists is that, especially with political reporting, resources are needed to do comprehensive coverage, and only corporate media has the resources to fund this kind of reporting. This argument strangely overlooks the fact that increasingly, more and more people can do amateur media from all over the world, and do a more informed, thorough job of it. The attacks in Mumbai and the current upheaval in Iran have shown us that amateurs in these regions often have more subtle and informed ideas about what’s going on than the professionals who fly in, do a little investigative reporting, and then fly back out.

In 1939, Orson Welles' radio drama, "War of the Worlds" set off a nationwide panic. Of course, the panic already existed in the form of the Second World War. Welles' radio broadcast just shed light on Americans’ already boiling anxieties. Even with a disclaimer preceding the show, the new medium of radio had the power to inspire widespread belief and panic because it already had people on edge with news of Germany's advances throughout Europe.

We'd like to think that by now we've gotten to the point where we understand our media; that “War of the Worlds” couldn’t happen again. But the media outpaces us. It evolves as quickly and effectively as we do. Every new trend redefines the media, from the suspect possibility of objectivity in journalism to the false dichotomy of the professional and the amateur. When Gil Scott Heron recorded "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," he was expressing the distrust many people had for the media in the sixties, and still have today. What he didn't know back then, and what we should know, but seem not to, is that the revolution doesn't need to be televised to be turned into just another media hype machine.