"'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be," said the Cat. 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"
---Lewis Carroll
Awakening to a masochistic impulse last Sunday, I opened the Op-Ed section of my local paper, The Kansas City Star. Throwing caution to the wind, I plunged headlong into the mind-engulfing thicket of sophistry. Running for my intellectual life, I felt the collective breath of the ravening wolves thirsting to rip the jugular vein coursing with the life-blood of my capacity for independent thought. Driven by an insatiable hunger to devour the cognitions of those who strayed from the herd, the voracious pack pursued me with a vengeance. Yet today I was moving with the agility of Brer Rabbit navigating the Briar Patch. Powered by critical thinking and a fierce determination to maintain my noetic integrity, I evaded the ferocious canines' furious bid to sink their razor-like fangs into the succulent gray matter they craved. Emerging from the tortuous copse, my psyche was bloodied but intact. And more importantly, it remained free.
Consider that The Kansas City Star, a paper that "serves" a metropolitan population of 1.9 million, is but one of 29 publications owned by The McClatchy Company, a corporate entity that raked in a net of $160.5 million in 2005(1). With McClatchy backing them and a daily subscription of 270,000 people, the Star can afford to publish the scribblings of the best propagandists money can buy. And they desperately need them.
Burdened with a task as daunting as the Twelve Labors of Heracles, the mainstream media strive with a fury to satisfy their demanding corporate paymasters. Yet unlike Heracles, they can't luxuriate in the knowledge that quiescence awaits. For theirs is a Sisyphean challenge. Truth, the eternal and immutable one, anxiously anticipates the moment his would-be assassins crest the summit where he is poised to hurl them violently back to the base of the hill. Powerless to prevent their relentless prevarication, Old Man Verity delights at the opportunity to condemn them to perpetual toil.
Ostensibly fragmented and autonomous, the MSM duplicitously peddle their perversions of reality in a seemingly cacophonous din of independent truth-seekers. Yet how could such an incestuously entangled group of entities owned by a handful of leviathan corporations possibly adhere to a spirit of integrity? Acting in unison to protect the interests of opulent shareholders and maleficent politicians, print, radio, and television media embody the Ministry of Truth Orwell envisioned.
Thomas Carlyle once commented:
"Burke said that there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate, more important far than they all."
Wallowing in a fetid sewer of avarice, speciousness, sensationalism, and pornography, Carlyle's Reporters' Gallery has all but abandoned its crucial role. The Fourth Estate has evolved from a fierce watchdog of the public interest into a massive swarm of winged vectors infecting the body politic with the parasitic disease of fascism.
While Rush Limbaugh and his ilk ply their craft with obvious glee, others providing grist for the propaganda mill apologize and plead the "mortgage and family" defense. Those who defy the corporatocracy by employing journalistic integrity often find themselves relegated to obscure roles or wrangling with government bureaucracy over meager unemployment benefits. Bearing the "fools license" of medieval court jesters, a precious few mainstream journalists reach the pinnacles of their profession despite their honesty. Their satirical styles of presentation save them from the axes of the censors and "down-sizers".
Like eager equestrians breaking green horses, the mass media endeavor to provide the pecunious stratum of society with obedient beasts of burden. Conditioning begins at our earliest moments of cognition. With the ubiquity of TV, radio, newspapers, and billboards, steady barrages of thought manipulation continue throughout our lives.
Mere extensions of the exploitative perversion of Capitalism which has emerged as a means of imposing economic tyranny in our constitutional republic, the glorified spin doctors of the MSM act as priests shepherding their flock. Espousing a doctrine promoting the Seven Deadly Sins, the prelates of the mainstream media have replaced the spiritual progress of their steadfast adherents with a moral regression that leaves Satan green with envy.
Banishing human reason and compassion to distant exile, the media barons and their minions perpetuate a chronic state of group psychosis. Reality and morality? Who can be bothered with such trivial matters when Playboy Spice Platinum is on the 60 inch flat-screen, frosty bottles of Coors are in the fridge, the NFL has its own network, and we have enough military fire-power to obliterate the Milky Way Galaxy. And the likes of Fox, CBS, and Time Magazine are there to quash those nasty occasional doubts and quickly restore our shining vision of America the Beautiful.
Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine's Corner within Cyrano's at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/.
Brilliantly said! Decortication is the game play of authoritarians from the beginning, but nowhere has it been achieved so deftly as in America the Delusional.
The bitter irony is, watching our country skid ever faster into the flames of perdition and ultimately the scrapheap of used up empires: it doesn't have to be this way.
I am convinced of this over and over by acts of courage played out day after day in Iraq and Afghanistan, not because the cause is just, but because of loyalty to others and deep care for their welfare. Such motives lead some people to step up to power, join unions, and organize the powerless, and to wake up, sometimes suddenly, to the level of propaganda that flows out the MSM day in and day out. Such people can see where their alliance lies, and it is not with this ruling class of robber barons and rubber chickens.
We can only hope that enough people keep and use their god given cortices for the kind of cogitation to see through the ruling class lies and finally understand "power to the people." We can hope they will do more than vote and never "back off" from the likes of Rummy and VoldeRove, evil monsters though they be. We can only hope.
by
Gregorio (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Sunday, October 29, 2006 at 11:32:22 PM
"Such motives lead some people to step up to power, join unions, and organize the powerless, and to wake up, sometimes suddenly, to the level of propaganda that flows out the MSM day in and day out."
I wonder about the level of propaganda that flows from the alternative media day in and day out.
by
Lilith's Spirit (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 115 comments)
on Monday, October 30, 2006 at 2:08:49 AM
I hate to state the obvious, but the exact same sort of manipulation was used in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Mao's China.
I do not know if we can save our nation's morals from death by manipulation. However, it is incumbent upon us all to get ready to do something (using Gandhi's and King's non-violent methods) in case the Republicans and their corporate masters steal any election next Tuesday.
Gandhi said that planning was the most important part of a campaign of nonviolence. WE NEED TO START PLANNING NOW!
Richard Girard
freegirard@juno.com
by
none (15 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 36 comments)
on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 3:26:55 PM
Any concrete suggestions with regard to the specifics of the plan? (This is a serious question, not a flame, because while I agree 100% with what you've said, I personally am at a total loss as to formulating a specific, non-violent form of response to what's currently happening in/to this country. The only thing I've come up with is learning as much as I can about how the NWO operates, watching current events very closely, and sharing with others -- in face to face discussions, and on-line -- what is and/or appears to be happening.)
by
Lilith's Spirit (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 115 comments)
on Saturday, November 4, 2006 at 9:06:17 AM
