A very silly season
The MPs' summer holiday — a modest break of ten weeks or so — is known by the media hacks as "the silly season". Without leaders to observe and interview the TV reporters are traditionally short of "news" to feed the working class. So, when a giraffe gets its neck stuck in the railings in Chessington Zoo or a tramp is found dead with a 1911 copy of The Tatler stuffed down his pants (the best place for it) it is several hundred times more likely to be "news" when the MPs are on holiday than when momentous things are happening in parliament — like when a Welsh Nationalist broke the arm off the Speaker's Chair.
Silliest of the silly TV "news' stories of the summer of '86, far outclassing even the policeman from Shropshire who handcuffed his wife and couldn't find the key to unlock her, or the expert in memory improvement who forgot to turn up for the Wogan show, was the case of the elderly parasite and the fish bone. It was on a Saturday in late August when the news broke: a silly ITN newsreader with a very serious facial expression announced to the nation that "Her Majesty, the Queen Mother has been taken by helicopter from her castle in Ayrshire to a hospital in Aberdeen after complaining of discomfort in the throat caused by what could be a fish bone eaten last night". The bulletins (and they went on throughout the evening and all the next day) went from bad to worse. On were brought throat specialists and fish specialists and bone specialists. Then we were shown a film of that awful, awful occasion only four years ago when the same woman had another fish bone stuck down her gob and had to stay in hospital overnight. It was excruciatingly silly TV, even for the silly season.
Not long after — or was it before? one loses touch the ITN Silly Squad was despatched to film Mrs Thatcher going in and coming out of a hospital, there to have an operation to stop her fingers from pointing in the wrong direction. Oh, where would we be without live TV coverage to keep us so closely informed about such events? While viewers were given minute by minute coverage of the case of the recalcitrant fish bone, no TV coverage was given to a speech delivered by economist, Professor Alan Williams (Guardian, 2 September) in which he stated that kidney patients in need of expensive dialysis treatment should be denied it because hip replacement operations are cheaper to perform and worthier of the money spent by the NHS. "We should not shrink from following where the logic of that approach leads us that hospital dialysis should be restrained and total hip replacement expanded." What sort of social system is it that can allow workers in urgent need of dialysis treatment to suffer and perhaps die while it can glory in the news that when its arch-parasites have a bone in the throat or a pain in the little finger no treatment is too good, no helicopter fast enough, to satisfy their needs. If it was a fiction it would be silly, but as social reality it is sick.
The triumph of scientific analysis
For four weeks Channel Four ran a series (Wednesdays. 8.30pm) entitled The Triumph of Capitalism. Each week a chosen expert (who does the choosing? who does the excluding?) was given thirty full minutes to sit in front of the camera and examine the success or otherwise of the capitalist system. Three out of the four chosen experts were firmly pro-capitalism. This is what is known as balance. Had the three supporters of capitalism presented serious defences of the system as it is. we could have devoted space to examining their talks. In fact, the three defenders of capitalism neither understood the economic laws of the profit system nor attempted to explain how it could ever function without the anarchy and social devastation which it so evidently causes. Perhaps we should have expected nothing more.
The fourth programme in the series (Wednesday. 3 September) was presented by Professor Gerry Cohen, an Oxford Professor of Philosophy whose book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A defence would be of interest to readers. Rarely, if ever, has the case against the capitalist system been presented in so eloquent and logical a manner on British TV. Cohen, through a process of rigorous historical and logical criticism, exposed the system as one of unearned minority privilege and legalised robbery. He pointed out that capitalism, far from setting out to satisfy needs, seeks above all to satisfy profit accumulation and this occurs at the expense of needs. Gerry Cohen did not go on to propose a socialist alternative (fortunately, considering a previous effort by him to do this on a TV discussion programme), but he did deny the alleged inevitability of capitalism and the oft-asserted impossibility of revolutionary social change. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that as far as his analysis went, and with the exception of minor theoretical points (for some reason he began by referring to workers selling their labour and only later used the Marxist term, labour power). Cohen's presentation could have been given by a member of The Socialist Party. Workers could do with more TV education like this — it compensates for the fish bones.
Steve Coleman
Blogger's Note:
A number of Professor Gerry Cohen's books were reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. To read the reviews, click on the dates below.:
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