MEDIA ROULETTE
December 7, 2003
Another War Day
The carnival of fools continues merrily along with CNNB (the B is for Bullshit) presenting CNN Live, today's version of its ongoing maintenance of the consensual hallucination.The dizzy exuberance of the talking heads, their giddy enthusiasm for everything, including seemingly the now-routine catastrophes --
There is something indescribably mad and maddening about it. That vacancy in the stare, which is not quite focused on anything, certainly not you, to whom it pretends to speak. But on top of that sense of not looking you in the eye, not leveling with you, there is a sense of disconnection between the look in the eye and the message that is coming out of the mouth.
It is the air of a person in the act of lying. There is a slight disturbance in the vibration. Lying creates a measurable disruption of the nervous system. Lie detectors measure its effect on the autonomic processes.
In the milder forms of lying, the fissure of consciousness is less dramatic than when someone is being given a polygraph test in a criminal law case, but it can still be detected, sometimes perhaps seen with the naked eye, or with an inner sense.
Most people are equipped with an alarm system to detect lies, but many in what considers itself a rational culture don't believe in that kind of intuition and so don't cultivate it. When someone you are intimate with lies to you about something important, the alarm is likely to be tripped. Less important lies from less known people may be harder to catch.
When it comes to pretty models selling you products, or talking heads indoctrinating you with the lies they are paid to disseminate, there are always implicit lies in the message, profound lies.
The face that delivers the message is disconnected from the message, not committed to it. You see that wandering look that a person gets who is lying to your face. Americans are so used to that kind of message now, many barely know the difference between truth and lies, reality and outlandish fantasy.
Swimming through the sea of toxic media messages I come upon the designed Asian American talking head with the mile-wide smile. She is engaged in a split-screen conversation with a similarly designed unit on the right, this one the male variety, clothed in a dark jacket with a sporty sky blue shirt and brightly colored tie. He is labeled beneath as a "Pentagon Spokesman," but he looks more like a Calvin Klein model, slightly aged and fermented.
He is somewhat more serious than the Asian American Announceresse, but otherwise barely distinguishable from her in terms of his apparent role, as indicated by the social cues and symbols presented for subliminal consumption.
He is virtually the same type of functionary unit as the talking head, and the in-house branded "Experts," like CNN's military experts who are likely to be former officers eager for show bizz celebrity and that paycheck, and also very much at one with the cause.
They are discussing a bombing, which the Announceresse previously described in a breathtaking 15-second soundbite. A bomb went off in a square in Afghanistan injuring some 15 people, some critically. The "president" of Afghanistan (HA!) has proclaimed that this was a terrorist attack. Thank you Mr. president. Thank you CNNB for that information.
And on it goes...
Tomorrow is another military milestone, another day to honor the military, but all for the wrong reasons. Pearl Harbor, a day that should give people cause for a lot of thought. Remember what it ushered in, what worldwide devastation the U.S. became a part of after that moment.
There is a case made by some that Roosevelt forced that confrontation knowingly to motivate Americans to jump into a war the public did not want America to be involved in.
(John Phelan says, FDR did a truly brilliant job of constructing a pretext. in September of 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a treaty committing all three countries to counterattack against new foes faced by any one of them. This gave Roosevelt a back door into Europe via the Pacific. Beginning one month later, and fourteen months prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, he launched secret military and economic operations against the Japanese Empire, obstructing its only access to oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. The Japanese response to this blockade -- open hostilities against the United States, beginning with a crippling preemptive attack on the Pacific Fleet -- was entirely predictable. In fact, it was Roosevelt's whole purpose in setting up the blockade.)
The pro-Roosevelt view of that would be that he wisely knew the fascist menace would eventually reach the U.S., when the country's ability to withstand it would have eroded. Or you could take a less charitable view of Roosevelt.
Back in the future of 2003, Bush is no FDR.. At least there was an investigation into Pearl Harbor. With the much more devastating attacks of 911, information has been vigorously suppressed by the White House from the beginning, so Americans do not know what happened, who perpetrated it and how, and what the weaknesses are that need to be addressed in order to prevent recurrences. That would seem to have been the first order of business on 9-12. Just as the first step toward security was never taken, neither have any others that would logically have followed if any serious attempt was really being made. What has the Bush administration done to make Americans safer? Anything? What has he done to Al Qaeda except to vastly multiply the number of eager recruits willing to give their lives for its cause by meting out so much barbaric and unjust cruelty to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq?
So on and on it goes...
The Wall Street Journal tells us China's growing thirst for oil and its cozying up to Saudi Arabia is changing the international dynamic of the oil market ... which means changing the geopolitical constellation of a world in which oil is the blood of life. Ominous rumblings. Why are world leaders not creating a huge collective effort to develop alternative energy system? Our leaders are the forerunners of an extinct species.
Farther on in today's swim through the media soup, I came upon a broadcast on CSPAN of a democratic convention in Florida. I tuned in during a speech by Kerry, followed by Wesley Clark and then Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. And they all sound great to me. They are talking about things that need to be talked about, things that haven't been talked about nearly as much as they should have, like stolen elections, rigged voting machines, corporate crime, the unjustified war in Iraq. I would be happy to have any of them be president. What a huge relief it would be to get the Bush cretins out of there. Eventually one of these Democrats will be chosen to run against Bush, but for now it's great to just hear them all saying things that need to be said. People are standing up, speaking out against the Bush clan. There is a new kind of energy, an electric feeling of activism that was not there in 2000 when Gore beat Bush, but not by enough.
People like Ted Rall who supported Nader because, as he wrote recently, he thought Bush and Gore were indistinguishable, now realize their mistake and are into unifying in resistance against Bush. Right on. Rall said he thought the worst of the two evils -- George Bush -- might be just "a meaner, stupider version of his dad, another linguistically challenged, harmless centrist with little agenda aside from paying off his contributors with, say, a cut in the capital."
A lot of people have that impression of Poppy Bush, that he's just a "harmless centrist." But that is only the public relations phony image. That is not the real George Bush. The real George Bush was pulling strings behind the scenes to promote the death squads in Nicaragua, the Iran Contra affair. That image of the inept moderate is fake.
But now people like Rall, who is surprised by how extreme Bush Jr. is and who supported Ralph Nader last time, see the urgency of uniting to create an effective movement to unseat the Bushes. That is a very good sign. Better times are coming.