To label the above TV test pattern a case of “cultural appropriation” is one gestalt one could apply. My view is closer to: oh good, n8v America has taken over television i.e. the “appropriation” is going the other way and now maybe the weather reports will be more bioregional, not cutting off at these arbitrary “white man” borders, not that I believe “whites” form a race e.g. the Aryans, the Pueblo of the Caucasus, with me somehow a member of their tribe.
My “media campaigns” don’t tend to have a lot of voltage behind them. My Pirate Party doesn’t rake in the dough, given the esoteric nature of our planks and platform.
We support new forms of public schooling geared towards building democratic institutions and training future diplomats. As it stands, private prep school alumni remain over-represented in the diplomatic corps (including the Peace Corps) and under-represented in the rank and file military i.e. the Smedley Butler racketeers, employees of USSA-style military socialism with capitalistic characteristics i.e. privatized profits.
In another campaign, I poke fun at the Qyoobists (hint: “Cube-ists”) and no one has a clue what I’m talking about. I like to denigrate and lambast a pseudo-ethnicity, science fictional at best, that no one believes in: people who worship the cube as their golden calf, and make it their symbol of rationality. Sure being “against” these people sounds surreal by design. Talk about straw men!
Another campaign involved taking a test pattern such as the one above and replacing the steady tone soundtrack with something more auditorily interesting: Azan. Why not immerse any viewers tuning in a test pattern in some American heritage of that flavor, Islam having been present in the Americas for some centuries, as a consequence of slavery especially although not exclusively?
However the TV stations mostly eschew test patterns these days and viewers are forgetting what they are and how they would appear in the wee hours of the morning, when a station had no other programming to offer.
At least we’re free to publish share those Azan segments on YouTube, perhaps unlisted, and perhaps with creative modifications of the test pattern design.
