all-seeing eye

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I don't quite understand the underlined sentences. Could anyone do me a favor. Thanks a lot.

remember the Gulf War? Or was that last season's hit show? The Gulf War was a war fought to demolish a memory, but it was also a war that produced no memory. It was our first 'television war': not blood and guts spilled in living color on the living room rug, not the transparent, objective immediacy of the all-seeing eye... but a radically distanced, technically controlled, eminently 'cool' postmodern optic which, in the doing, became an instrument of the war itself.

 

[RonBee]

The writer is complaining that television showed the war but not the gore. (Or not enough gore.) The writer seems to think that television in its portrayal of the war acted as a propaganda tool of the military. He also seems to be unhappy that more Americans didn't die.

 

[RonBee]

The term "objective immediacy" seems to be a contradiction in terms, since only distance truly confers objectivity. Also, "all-seeing eye" implies that television sees everything, but of course it does not.