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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 9/16/08

Myth America: A Stand-up Tragedy

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Most people guess Osama bin Laden, but there’s another, equally accurate answer: Pat Tillman. Perception is reality and whether or not you think Osama or Tillman is a hero depends mostly on which propaganda is reaching your ears. Sure, I know “propaganda” is not a word commonly heard in polite discourse in this country—we prefer euphemisms like public relations, spin, or hype—but don’t kid yourselves: We live in a corporate propaganda state.

Perhaps my favorite illustration of life in a corporate propaganda state is the daily New York Times corrections box. Each day, the newspaper of record comes clean about what it got wrong the day before. For example, in early 2008, the Times ran a cutting edge article on the topic of tattoos but referred incorrectly to the status of Gwen Stefani’s tattoos. The next day, in the corrections box, came a dose of reality: Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos.

Our long national nightmare is over. We can all sleep better tonight knowing that Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos. So, don’t let it ever be said the corporate media does not admit its mistakes. It’s all there in black and white every single day.

Of course, the tacit message behind the daily New York Times corrections box is this: Besides a few minor typographical errors, everything else in yesterday’s paper was correct. It was accurate. It was, to use their phrase, fit to print…and has now passed on to become part of our official history. This is typical of life within a society dominated by a corporate-run press.

Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outlets are large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common goal: to make a profit by selling a product—an affluent audience—to a given market: advertisers). Therefore, we shouldn’t find it too shocking that the image of the world being presented by a corporate-owned press very much reflects the biased interests of the elite players involved in this sordid little love triangle.

That’s why every major daily newspaper has a business section, but not a labor section. Why at least once a week those same newspapers run an automobile section, but no bicycle section. This is why when the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops, it makes headlines. But if the global infant mortality rate rises, it’s questionable if it will even make the papers (and if it does, it’ll be buried on page 23). In other words, if you created a blueprint for an apparatus that utterly erased critical thought, you can make none more efficient than the American corporate media.

We may live in a relatively free country but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to break free of the cookie-cutter formula being rammed down our throats at every turn. I remember eating lunch in a diner in Virginia Beach, Virginia—lots of military bases around there—when we heard a deafening roar from outside. We asked the waitress what it was and she smiled proudly: “That’s an F-14. The sound of freedom.”

What sounds like freedom or looks like freedom or feels like freedom is often nothing more than longer chains and bigger cages. What passes for rebellion in this country is usually co-opted, sanitized, and sold back to us as a trend or commodity…and it starts young. Clarence Darrow once said: “Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.” In a poem, Ani DiFranco gives us one example of teaching children not to doubt. She talks of a test we all face in kindergarten or the first grade. You know the deal. They show us two squares and a circle and the inevitable question is: Which one doesn’t belong? Thus, at the tender age of five or six, we’re being taught that different doesn’t belong, different is wrong.

That same child, by the time they graduate high school, has seen an average of 360,000 television commercials. If they grow up and reach age 70—an increasingly difficult proposition, I might add—they will have spent ten of those 70 years watching TV.

Thanks, in part, to corporate media propaganda…
…we exist within a system in which the "Department of War" was magically transformed into the "Defense Department” just after World War II
…we exist within a system in which the US uses helicopters called Apache to quell ethnic cleansing
…we exist within a system in which more than one out of every 100 American adults are in prison, but we still live in the land of the free
…we exist within a system in which we can carpet bomb civilians from 15,000 feet in the name of humanitarianism and we still live in the home of the brave
…we exist within a system in which a war criminal like Henry Kissinger can be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize

This same system allows for free and fair presidential elections open to any candidate over the age of 35…who, of course, praises god and the free market (or am I being redundant?), describes his/her enemies as “evil,” understands that the rest of the world hates us because we’re free, and, oh yeah, can raise at least a half-billion dollars.

This same electoral system see third party candidates routinely barred from public debates (and often censored by misguided “progressives,” for that matter), only half the eligible voters will even bother showing up, and when all else fails, you can count on the Supreme Court to set things straight (and I do mean straight).

Since we have reached the electoral portion of tonight’s program, I’d like to present a public service announcement. I’m going to provide some of the many, many reasons you shouldn’t vote for McCain:

He’s raised twice as much money from Wall Street than his opponent. He voted for every Iraq war appropriation bill he faced. He refused to be photographed with San Francisco's mayor for fear it'd be interpreted that he supported gay marriage. He voted against single payer health care. He supports the death penalty, the Israeli war machine, and the fence on the US-Mexican border. When asked if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?” he responded: “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing." He voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He…uh-oh. Sorry, I messed up and gave you some of the many, many reasons you shouldn’t vote for Barack Obama. My bad…

Regardless, I do believe that either McCain or Obama can help make this country what it once was: an arctic region covered with ice (insert rimshot here).

In 2006, the Democrats gained a majority in Congress. How’s that working out for you? Asking this reminds me of something Steve McQueen said in the movie, The Magnificent Seven. When asked how things were going, he replied: "It's like that fella who fell off a ten-story building. As he was falling, people on each floor heard him say, 'So far, so good.'"

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