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"The vessels became incense burners
and the incense shit
The gypsies became mayors.
and the thief captains"
G. Souris

You return like a human being to your home at noon, at night. You long for the peace, the warmth, the rest of your private castle.
It's almost as if, along with your loved ones, you are "welcomed" by the restless and tireless television eye.
With women and children, you unconsciously fix your gaze on the channels' lunch and dinner programs.

(Public opinion polls rank the midday zone as the one with the highest spectacles).

So, at the time of the blessed family gathering, the profiteers of the show choose to show everything that is vulgar and vulgar that is circulating on Greek television.
Almost all private channels, imitating cheap, gossipy "American" shows, undertook to educate the Greek family in vulgarity and debauchery.

The scenery is the same and unchanged everywhere.

A female commodity presenter, leaning back and half-naked, to portray the repressed fantasies of the deprived everywhere, framed by a motley human jumble. This jumble, obeying the logic of quotas, represents all of Greek society.

Necessarily two or three female speakers, who are enthusiastically advertising their "flaw".

A couple of fabricated and crumbly jokes, something like a "relic collection" of the once-good Greek television.

Young women with half-up miniskirts, dreaming of a golden, fast career – a dream of life – free from inhibitions and other… petty-bourgeois virtues.

And a couple of out-of-breath, fumbling old men, like Kostopoulos, who play, hilariously or tearfully, the musketeers.

This whole trifling mixture, without much effort, entertains the Greek family, using, as raw material, mud and semen mixed together, cultivating in social life the kyrakatinism. Characteristic of the market ethos and the chaotic style is the title of the trash-shows. (The Zenes, the Tatians, the… labires, the menioi parade).

You immediately understand that the whole project, the one that systematically propagates, is the spirit of an everyday life, summed up in pleasant “softies”, according to the revealing formulation of a profound “commentator”. These television shows-evacuations (to justify Souris’ quatrain in the preface of the article) turn the world into a keyhole. A keyhole of worldly presentism, malicious insinuations, derisive gibberish about fashion, wealth, artistry, all seasoned with spicy sex seasonings and trivial fantasies for all tastes.

The consequences of all this obscenity are devastating. Young and old are gradually addicted to pettiness, condemnation, and gossip, they are indoctrinated in consumerism and greed. The consequences for children are literally criminal (and this is due to the absence or tolerance of parents).

However, a reference to the "ancient spirit" is deemed necessary. Plato, in his "Republic", criticized poets and prose writers who glorified violence, paralysis, and immorality. He condemns them as teachers of youth, because in their works they present people who are unjust and yet happy, and on the contrary, virtuous but unhappy, who claim that injustice is beneficial when it is not revealed ("...that many unjust people are happy, but the just are miserable, and that injustice is beneficial if it is hidden". 392 b). He puts Socrates in the mouth of Adeimantus to tell him that when young people hear - today they see - stories about the pitiful behavior of gods and heroes - today's television figures - and do not become indignant, "they will come to not consider it unworthy for those who, after all, are human, to commit the same acts."

And if this is not obvious, the direct influence of television's wretchedness is evident in the language. ("Where did he learn to swear?" parents often ask in astonishment.) The language of television is crippled, uncontrolled, abused and oftentimes vulgar.

And this language is passed on to children.

In the most sensitive period of his language education, the defenseless and isolated child in front of the television is "taught" the Greek language in a brutal manner.
It has been very aptly said that for the child today, television has become a third parent and his native language is no longer the language of his mother but of television.
A language poor and cheap in words but rich and attractive in images. Perhaps these seem somewhat chimerical.
Maybe.
But those of us in the classroom speak "from experience." And this "firsthand" experience is heartbreaking.

(At this time, when every night the minds of the Greeks are "educated" - ground in the "I'm stepping on corpses" drill of "Survivor", with this brainless herd of slug "players" and enjoy the gnawing of bottomless stupidity, the children at school - "the most imitative" according to Aristotle, the child - in the courtyards are divided into fighters and celebrities and compete with their snack as a prize.
Who is to blame? The decline and disintegration of the once Greek society is passed down from generation to generation.

And let's get back to language.

"For man," says Brecht, "to feel human, you must call him." Call him human.

"If a child does not hear people talk about love, he will not feel love. If he does not hear people talk about values, he will not feel the need to fight for values. And so he will never become a child with values." (S. Kargakos, "Alexia", p. 142).

"One by one, great words, such as honor, dignity, purity, virtue, friendship, are being erased from our language, and we do not feel that the absence of such words from our mouths means that the noblest veins of human greatness have been erased from within us," Kontoglou writes in "Vasanta."

(I have written and will write again that I have never heard a student in class convey extracurricular experiences or knowledge without beginning his speech with the now stereotypical phrase "sir, I saw it on television").

I will close with an observation. Older readers will remember how in the old reading rooms the text dominated and the image was of secondary importance.
In the new reading materials, the image prevails and the text, the speech, is overshadowed.

This change did not happen by chance.

Today's generation of images, of television, resents the written word, because it requires thought and effort to understand.
The image is easy, but it "eats", it cripples the word.
Perhaps in the future the teacher will be replaced by a huge screen in place of the blackboard, where the lesson will be "played out." ("I shout in Greek and no one even responds to me," Elytis cries prophetically).

A generation is coming of age that watches... Survivor, but won't know how to survive.

By Dimitris Natsios/teacher-Kilkis

Source: http://thesecretrealtruth.blogspot.com/2017/08/blog-post_4317.html#ixzz4xjWGtpvE