Bloggrokker (Scott) 8/22

Pluralism? Television? Fear of death? 9/11?
Oh, these take me back--take me back a few years ago (I'd like to say 2002 or 2003, I don't know for sure) and to the fall schedule of the ABC (and for our purposes here, the almighty acronym might stand for the Althusser-Barthes Corporation--Ha!) network and a little exercise in prime-time broadcast fearmongering called Threat Matrix.
I never saw this show. Then again, I don't think I needed to. Postmodernwise, we can judge this book by its title, methinks.
From what I culled from the ads sandwiched between raging bouts of cathode-ray oxymoronitis, i. e. reality tv, TM concerned itself with anti-terrorist tech-quads.
And hot on the heels of that po-mo post-millenio boogeyman 9/11, too. A bad idea? It's easy to think so, what with TM already a victim of ratings evaporation. Hang on, though.
Don't forget--marketing engineers (and yes, they ARE engineers) are skewed postmodern gods, of a kind. They know of the plurality of words.
And they know of The Matrix trilogy.
Hence Threat Matrix.
And so they did a slapdash job of counterracting cultural fears of smoldering skyscrapers and anthrax-o-grams with popular images of Keanu Reeves as Neo kicking the binary butts of anthropomorphized computer viruses wearing Ray-Bans. Such whiz-bang wonders and word-associations certainly seem like the breed of disposable quick fix Americans crave for all of our fears and problems.
Still, Threat Matrix failed. Despite the all-too desirabe postmodern symptoms as fear of death and a thinly-veiled deceptive stab at market-driven plurality, Threat Matrix failed.
What went wrong?
Nothing. If Threat Matrix owes its origins to postmodern symptoms, just like everthing else that flickers its way along the airwaves, then it owes its demise to these same symptoms.
Absrdity and meaninglessness, also of postmodern genes, kicked in. Absurdity and meaninglessness killed the show and turned the houselights down low.
Not low enough, though. Postmodernity seems to recycle. Call it a cultural graverobber-esque. And if i'm wrong, well, does any medium truly die in what we might identify as our curent geological time, the Frankencene Epoch?
Perhaps the Karloffic Period?
What? No good?
I know, I know--meaninglessness.