Sunday Night, March 12, 2006
Breakaway
Every day, year after year, I feel more alienated from the -- "mainstream media" -- whatever the hell you call that horror zone. I tried to put on some of the Sunday morning news shows this morning, feeling that urging to knuckle down and do my duty to "be informed", keep an eye on "what is happening", etc. But I have very low tolerance for those broadcasts. I think I have about as much tolerance for a Fox news broadcast, for example, as I do of watching someone being pulled to pieces with tweezers.I put on Tim Russert and I gag. And he's one of the best of the lot, if such a concept can even be invoked. These obsequious, puppydog conformists, so eager to gain acceptance in that twisted culture. Ugh. So eager to adopt the language, the poses and postures, show that one is perfectly indoctrinated by the correct reciting of the doctrine, the fantasy history. It's just too revolting.
Switch on C-Span -- again, the highest level within the world of broadcast media -- it gives you more than soundbites and dizzying animated logos. It gives you a lens through which to look at Washington. But even then -- God, that Washington culture, that fantasy veil over a world of graft and the worst kind of murder is still what you see.
These politicians, they look like they should announce, "I'm not a congressman, but I play one on TV" with their pancake makeup and their perfectly molded ersatz JFK hairdos. It's so vulgar and atrocious. When they talk it's 100 miles from any reality that can be pinpointed.
Pro or con they all maintain these absurd pretenses, that the U.S. is in Iraq to "help" the people attain "democracy". Now the relative peaceniks among them who advocate bringing the troops home before their constituents tear them limb from limb are saying, "The Iraqis have to do this for themselves. We can't do it for them." As if "we" were doing anything for the Iraqis. They have to maintain this high-flown pretension of the great good will of anything "America" does.
It's so far from the real world the real working, struggling people of the U.S. and the world inhabit that it's hard to even find an entry point at which to begin a discussion. To even enter the discussion presented in collusion by the handful of existing broadcast media is already to have adopted a language through which no real progress can be made to solve any of the problems of real people.
Last night The History Channel showed Oliver Stone's JFK, and at the end they brought on a couple of stooge "experts" to disclaim the movie. The host goon, mysteriously invested with some sort of vague authority for being host, spoke smirkingly to some alleged expert, who said, no, "most historians" do not believe the "conspiracy theories" and the "lone gunman theory still stands."
But the ending titles of the movie had just observed that the House Select Committee on Assassinations was forced to conclude that there was a "probability of conspiracy" in the case because of overwhelming evidence that would have made them appear like dunces to deny it. These days Bush vs Gore showed us the rulers have since dropped any pretense of making sense. But in those days they still pretended to a modicum of rational integrity.
So the bare fact of it, no interpretation here, is that the "lone gunman theory" does not at all stand. It's just a basic lie, pretending that the second conclusion was never reached. They could say, "Well now it's a tossup," one of each. It would still be an ignorant comment, based on a very distorted evaluation of the evidence. But at least that would accommodate the fact that the second governmental investigation came to a conclusion of a probable conspiracy.
But that detail cannot be introduced into the public dialogue, or it would make people think too much. As Allen Dulles said and the time the Warren Commission was being conducted, they weren't answering questions because "one question would lead to another and then... " And then it would lead to an unraveling of the whole Big Lie. Hence the importance of maintaining the Magic Bullet Theory and the Lone Gunman Theory.
Ironically, they still show the movie because it's worth bucks to them, and the one tenet of the religion of capitalism that stands above all else is that nothing supercedes The Almighty Buck. So they schizophrenically show the movie, then later tell you it's a bunch of bull, a fairy tale. It is a fiction movie, but the ideas it explains are more real than the official reality of the establishment media.
I did see something today, however, that did not make me feel alienated, but actually made real flesh-and-blood sense, and I must pass it on to you. You can read this statement here, and you can listen to a great reading of the piece by Air America's Mike Malloy here. This is for real. This gets close to the real world. I think it represents the level that the culture at large must reach now in order to begin to face the real problems. There is no point in participating in the dialogues presented on the corporate media. It is increasingly irrelevant. People should just turn away from in en masse. Let it do whatever it does with no audience. It's already to the point of existing as though in a conch shell hearing the echo of its own voice.
It's time to make a new world, to turn away and let that one decay and die.
And elsewhere in the news...
In the Good News File, Maryland has decided to send Diebold packing. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or anyone who believes in voting, there is no point in having voting machines that can come up with any kind of skewed total for a variety of causes and offer no way of tracking or recounting the vote. No good. Computer World
A clipping in the Reverend Moonie-owned, right wing United Press International/ Washington Times, "'Corruption has run amok in intelligence circles and the president should be impeached,' a former CIA analyst says. Also, he said, the United States is undergoing a constitutional crisis. 'I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture,' wrote Ray McGovern in a recent letter as he returned his Intelligence Commendation Award medallion to Congressman Pete Hoekstra, R-MI, and Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence." Curtains -- Now Bush is losing his base, Republicans, the white males who were the only human beings rigid enough to hold onto their belief in his lies this long. At the end of the article it says it's uncertain whether Democrats can take advantage of Bush's weakness in the polls now. I think the question is not whether the whores of the political class can take advantage of it, but whether the American people can. Washington Post Now it Begins -- Thirty House members have signed onto a demand for an impeachment inquiry. Global Research Ralph Nader on the outlaws in Washington on CommonDreams. "Day by day, we're giving up what our forefathers fought to bequeath us since that famous Declaration of Independence of 1776. They were determined that people in this country would not be arrested without charges and jailed indefinitely, that they would not be tortured, or sent to be tortured in dictatorial regimes, or deprived of habeas corpus to take their incarceration to our courts of law, or be snooped on at the whim of the President and his deputies or that people in faraway lands would be destroyed in the tens of thousands due to a fabricated war-invasion-quagmire. They instituted a constitution so that people would not be jailed without "probable cause", or be lied to about taking this country and its soldiers to war, or have shoved aside the checks and balances represented by American courts and the Congress. All these are being done by two pro-Vietnam war draft dodgers! ... It is time to make the spring of 2006 the tipping point period for constitutionalism, justice and a sane foreign and national security policy. More yawns must turn into growls from outside Washington, DC."