![]() So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it’s a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the god that we should all bow down to, it’s a very dangerous medium. My general view is that television when it becomes commercialized and profit-based tends to trivialize and dehumanize our lives. Things coalesced slowly as I became more and more interested or obsessed, pick your word, with the inordinately powerful and all-encompassing effect that television seems to have on the human race. And I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why it was that our end came before its time, and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death. “The album title came from a book by Neil Postman, who wrote a short book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is about the history of the media, particularly as it relates to political communication – i.e., how things have changed since such works as Lincoln’s speeches were made available for the general public to read. The idea that by isolating the high- profile enemy like Gaddafi you can entertain the electorate into polling booths to put the X in the right place is what I call the soap opera of state.” Roger Waters (749) In the preamble to this record I talk about that, because one of the other parallel concerns in the record is the idea of politics as entertainment. They’ve already gone out and quite happily bombed Tripoli. What’s Reagan going to do if one of his frigates is blown up by Gaddafi using a nuclear weapon? I hate to think. Because one of these people who think they’re not getting a fair slice of the cake is going to get hold of these weapons and fucking well let them off. Which is why I have great concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and why I think it essential that Europe becomes a nuclear-free zone. I am concerned with the idea in this piece that rampant, unrestricted market forces are trampling over everybody’s fucking lives and making the world a horrible place to live in and also increasing the potential risk of us all blowing ourselves up because we’ve become so frustrated in our efforts to compete with each other. I just feel we could be doing a lot better than we are if we off-load the idea that the only route to progress, the cause of human happiness, is competition. And that we can reduce the percentage possibility of some truly appalling trauma, be it the Bomb, AIDS, a minor invasion, or simply being told you have no worth, we don’t need you, piss off. I know there is a utopian idea that the possibility exists for communities to exist where people try to look after one another, and co-operate with one another, in the hope that they can get from the cradle to the grave, and at some point along the way feel fulfilled. But is home the most important thing to a human being in the sense of belonging to a certain thing or person? Having that sense of security and the feeling you are not going to be moved on or blown to pieces? The feeling that you have the right to a continuous existence within the context of the society to which you belong from the moment you are born to the moment you die in order to arrange yourself into a good shape to die in? I don’t know. Is home keeping out of the weather? Being reasonably well fed? Being safe? Is home doing those things in the context of a family? We all think we understand what we mean by the idea of home. ![]() To answer your question of what the main themes of the record are, Ian Ritchie, who produced the record, is quite distressed that I didn’t call it Home, which for a long time was the working title, because one of the things that the record is about is what home is. It is lend credence to the idea that in there somewhere is a story, if you care to search for it. It’s a bit like the map in the frontispiece of Winnie The Pooh, in that it has dotted lines showing Billy’s route, where great-uncle David’s house is, and where Radio KAOS is in Laurel Canyon. ![]() “Included in this program is a map of the northern hemisphere, showing all the western listening devices, where they are and what they are, and including an exploded map of South Wales where BILLY, the main character, comes from, and an exploded map of LA, where he goes to.
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