As always, I have no expectation that anybody will read this. Because it's long; and I am not normal. :nw:
I knew a naive college student who wanted to be a journalist to expose the world's problems so that society could eventually fix them.
The problem is that the root of 'the worlds problems' are not accessible to journalists - the world's problems are the back rooms where the big wigs posse up to dictate how best to further the dogma, who to promote and why, etc. Even if a journalist DID get in there and publish a scathing expose, it would be as easily dismissed as the hocus-pocus-seeming youtube videos of the 'secret rites' of masonry. The essential thing is to get it across to these wackjobs that those demeaning rituals ARE in fact pathetically disgusting, that the false idols ARE in fact out-of-place, that the dogmas ARE in fact deleterious.
Demonstrating that the dogmas are deleterious is the only thing that journalism CAN do, but to do it well, the degree of historical knowledge, philosophical insight, and razor-sharp poetics has to be far and away more refined than what basically anybody has today -- not because humans are incapable of poetics, philosophy, and history, though. We all have the capacity for them. But the institutions (to me, 'the institutions' is a much better term than 'the system,' re comment below) cranks out so much fucking NOISE and ISOLATION that those tools are very difficult to hone.
Bukowski was somewhat OK in historical knowledge, but his poetics and philosophy were rock-solid (I was surprised to read in Last Night Of The Earth just how highly he regarded good philosophers - the highest of anybody). Just another in a long line of ways that I come up with toe understand the man's awesomeness. But there was a real limitation there, too. I don't offer many Buk critiques, but in the history department he was often very lazy, using cop-out lines like 'humanity you have always ...' I'm not going to say that he was too drunk to do the research, though, because the reasearch tools just weren't around then that we have today. So even my critique is not really a critique so much as pointing out a limitation of the period that he lived in - but it also had advantages, such as having experienced american culture when there was still some rawness to it, before the war watered it down in plastics, speedy-machines, domestic technologies, etc.
the underlying question is whether a just and benevolent system can exist anywhere.
What exactly do people mean 'system'? To me, that is one of the weaknesses of this debate over the past 50 years. This ill-defined idea of a system. 5:28 did not mention any system. Mr Chalk did not mention any system. Public art (er ... all art, because there is no other kind) always has political connotations. These chalk drawings may not have moved mountains but it would be hard to argue that they are less effective than the 'work' of some run-of-the mill academically abstracted or emotivist artiste.
Bringing the corruption to awareness is not nothing. Corruption is a problem, ignorance is a problem. Awareness of corruption can be helpful - but somewhere along the line somebody has to have the courage and the tools to
explain the corruption and come up with some method of empowerment, not just point fingers at the bad guys and sing a song about em (which is where everybody from the Beatles and Mr. Chalk to modern invistigative journalists come up short).