SAID THE DISHEVELED PROFESSOR TO HUNGOVER STUDENTS

He is, for lack of a better word, mangy. Unshaved, and his shirt permanently food stained. He is either wearing too many layers of clothing, or he just returned from the gym without shower, beads of perspiration cling to his brow.

The students lack hydration and sufficient oxygen in their frontal lobes. They hide behind laptop computers and cell phones, pretending to take notes as they text, search for dates on their My Space accounts.

The professor wipes his hands on the thighs of his oversized, unwashed trousers, adjusts his suspenders without desired effect. He approaches the podium, while fingers tap away, the sound of clicking and low breathing fills the air. He speaks.

Let's take a moment to review.

Feedback mechanisms: the capacity to register and consider the impact of your actions, and make good decisions with critical information in hand.

I put my hand over the flame; signals of pain are sent to my brain, I decide to remove my hand.

So feedback mechanisms, and the intimate relationship that these mechanisms have with a functioning democracy. And, a hypothesis, democracy as essential for the survival of the species.

Imagine the gangster's fate, and not to pick on Italian Americans, but recall if you will a scene from Godfather Part II. Handsome Robert De Niro plays the young Marlon Brando character in the flashback sequences. He's a recent immigrant trying to support his wife and young sons. He works hard, but is let go when the neighborhood Don insists that the shopkeeper give De Niro's job to his nephew instead. This is only one injustice meted out by the gangster, he routinely bullies, steals, usurps, all in support of his own largess, and usually at the expense of the neighborhood.

What feedback does he get? Generally, supplication, people just take whatever he dishes out. Does he really feel their pain, the effect of his action's cause? How could he, when, to the injured party, any honest feedback only promises more pain and retribution.

So what happens? Inevitable to the arc of the story we've already seen in Part I, De Niro bravely acts on behalf of his own self-interests, and the interests of the neighborhood at large, by blowing the gangster's brains out.

Let's make the leap now. Media as feedback mechanism.

A student, with an unchecked fully loaded pimple on the tender front of his nose, is temporarily transported back to the classroom from the action of an online video game by the sound of his own vocalized yawn.

Unphased, the professor resumes.

When discussing the coverage of events occurring on September 11, 2001, activist and scholar Robert McChesney notes that in a functioning democracy, media institutions would have led a national debate addressing three critical questions. What happened, why did it happen, and what are we going to do about it to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

The phenomenal growth of the 9/11 Truth movement indicates, among other perversities, the failure of the media to find answers to the first question. How could a building freefall, at the same rate as a planned demolition, when the ruptures created by aircraft were at the top of the towers, instead of at the structure's base? And other nagging questions about the actual events of the day.

Missing from the corporate media, and the 9/11 Truth movement generally, are investigations into questions two and three. Why did these people, whoever they were, orchestrate these grotesque crimes? And what can we do to prevent future acts?

Thus we are denied the benefit of a functioning feedback mechanism, access to critical information, which we might then agree to use as foundation for better policies. Like the gangster in Mario Puzo's story, we continue to beat up hard on neighborhoods sitting atop "our" oil. At our own peril.

The example is not isolated. Lacking effective feedback mechanism, we sit supplicant as our taxes finance more highways over public transit; subsidize companies that feed poisons to our children's eyes and stomachs; reward insurance and drug cartels who deny us health care; embolden those who wrong and/or dispose of workers who attempt to organize for a living wage; et cetera.

McChesney, and other media activists, point to a way out of this mess, apart from the blowing out of brains solution.

Citing the works of Jurgen Habermas, McChesney notes that in democratic revolutions back in the 15th and 19th centuries, "public spheres for discourse" proved to be essential tools.

From McChesney's book, CORPORATE MEDIA AND THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY:

"This public sphere was a 'space' independent of both state and business control which permitted citizens to interact, study and debate on the public issues of the day without fear of immediate reprisal from the political and economic powers that be.

Although Habermas's model is idealized, the notion of the public sphere provides a useful framework for democratic media activists. In Habermas's view, the public sphere loses its democratic capacities as it is taken over by either the state or business or some combination of the two. In the United States clearly, business and commercial values have come to dominate the media as perhaps nowhere else in the world. To reassert the "public sphere" notion of a media system would require a major commitment to nonprofit and non-commercial media, at the very least, and perhaps a good deal else.

But the public sphere framework only points in the direction of solutions; there are probably any number of workable alternatives. The immediate objective for media activists is to get this long neglected subject on the political agenda and to encourage public participation."

And yes, this will be on the test.

A bell sounds. Relieved of their task at hand, the students repair respectively to dorms for a late morning nap, to cafeteria or off campus chain outlets for high fat nourishments.