A segment from Patrick’s Scattered Notes collection.

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No one can deny that the media are changing the world.  The three T’s – TV, Tabloids, and Tattler-ism are infecting every susceptible mind on the Tube network. Murders in remote English towns are rivaled by cannibals in a US city.  The worst black-gay-immigrant bashing in Madrid is immediately surpassed by a mob in Vilnius.

So, given the clear news that the media amplifies events, magnifies evil, rewards notoriety, is it any wonder civilization is suffering an inner collapse, and attack from within?  That the most privileged countries produce the largest number of free enterprise monsters?

A whole African country hacking its citizens is somehow more comprehensible than one phantom who can masquerade among us, unrecognized until he has deep fried his boyfriend and becomes the subject of a movie.  A country at perpetual war produces psychopaths – or is it the other way around?

Nations fed a continuous diet of high voltage entertainment requires a certain jolt in their news coverage as well. The blatant masochist is led out of the closet by closeups of masters in horror and torture.  Boys used to rip frogs apart.  After the media splurge about the poor English boy bludgeoned by other boys, within a week at least two similar cases elsewhere. After Bobbitt, we suddenly read of all sorts of amputations by the most diverse means.

To dwell on such personal tragedy is a clear invasion of privacy and can only have evil results. The only ones who need to know are the police and affected families and close friends.  None of us will be prevented from similarly harming a child, God forbid we should want to, but some – you, or me, or he might be tempted to taste the blood of innocents and seek the infamy, for in our world of celebrity worship, fame and infamy are only two forms of the same phenomenon, equally profitable. 

Many monsters are auditioning for movie contracts.