CG, I think you are absolutely right. Good Morning America is not about news or education or debate; it is about entertainment.

Also, I think very few people actually *watch* the program. I would guess that for most people it is simply background noise as they do other things -- get ready for work, get the kids off to school, clean the house.

My theory is that, since we are basically social animals, like baboons, the drone of human voices in the background makes people feel secure. If someone who is used to having the television on in the morning shuts it off, the house suddenly feels empty, lonely, threatening. Having the television on is a sort of addiction.

Steve
singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/

Well said. I actually used to work in Network News, and one of the reasons I quit was what I felt was a lack of journalistic integrity, i.e. ratings was paramount to all else.

I don't like them either Keith. It doesn't come anywhere near to representing the experience.

"They can show hippies dancing on acid in the news, but i can assure you that films of daimistas in bow ties and crowns or shamans spitting phlegm into their palms and examining it are not going to win people over either."

This is an interesting statement. Some kind of more accurate representation of what the ayahuasca experience is for people seems to be the discussion, but I hesitate to say that the dress or image can really offer that. Weather you look at the British explorer purging, the shaman singing and praying, or the Daimistas dancing in their uniforms, your only seeing the physical setting and culture surrounding their specific way of engaging the aya experience.

Here's an anonymous comment from Singing to the Plants, Steve's wonderful bog site, about the Santo Daime legalization that speaks to what I'm thinking about pretty well.

"I understand that it's interesting looked at from a distance, as a movement, a Church, or as part of the entheogenic culture, but when your in it, it's the life inside us being felt deeply and in a profoundly personal manner that's the core of the experience."

"I'm suggesting that the heart or core of the issue of the legalization of the Santo Daime isn't about the US Govt., or even about the SD Church. It's the transformational and deeply powerful interior experiences of the people who attend, and our feeling that it's our sacred right to have those experiences that is the real story".

"In my opinion legalization is an effect of the commitment and powerful faith that it's our personal right to behold and be present in the sacred moment. The strength of that commitment and faith in that right is why I feel it's getting negotiated out in the world".

However you dress to attend, it's the interior transformation that the images can't really show you, and can only be experienced by participating.