Then the orange-halo-headed Trump was paraded in. To his followers he was the savior who would re-redeem the country from the devilish divinity Obama, the false prophet. He would drain the swamp. Desperate middle-Americans revered this NYC real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star who for years was nothing but a running joke among those who actually knew who he was. It didn't matter to his congregation. Not in the slightest. That he gave to the rich and screwed the middle-class and the poor, increased the military budget, waged secretive wars via drones and private mercenaries didn't matter a bit. He was a religious figure. To Hillary Clinton's and Obama's acolytes, he was Satan himself, and for four years the anti-pageant play was presented by the corporate mainstream media to exorbitant box-office receipts and ratings. God and Satan fought in the ring for the ultimate fighting championship.
Now Joseph Biden - just as Ronald Reagan, another acting president, had the coffee brewing for "Morning in America" - is greeted by the same media filmmakers as the latest savior, an aging but still virile demi-god who will usher in "a new day" in America. The pageantry surrounding his recent virtual inaugural, like all inaugurals, was a religious ceremony choreographed within an ironic circle of 20,000 armed palace guards and barbed-wire fencing protecting the erection of the new king, one who, like Oedipus in Sophocles' tragedy, is presented as the savior who will defeat the viral plague attacking the new Thebes. Unlike Oedipus, however, one can be assured that Biden will not seek to discover the murderer of Laius (JFK), the former king, whose assassination resulted in the plague devastating the country. Oedipus's search for the truth didn't end well, and Biden's long insider career bodes well for no truth-seeking. And like his predecessors' inaugural ceremonies, this one featured cultural idols such as Hunger Games Lady Gaga, Madonna 2.0, promoting herself as befits idols, and Bruce Springsteen offering his evenings "small prayer for our country" - Land of Hopes and Dreams:
Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder's rollin' down this track
Well, you don't know where you're goin' now
But you know you won't be back...I said this train...
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train...
Faith will be rewarded
No, we won't be back, unless you think Biden's slogan - "Build Back Better" - which is also the slogan of the world's rulings elites, means what it says. Perhaps then your faith will be rewarded.
I'll go with George Carlin when he said that to believe in the American Dream you have to be asleep.
My faith is that the corporate mass-media hypnotists who work for the owners of the country will continue to pump out their religious spectacles and that the various congregations will support their masters as always. The will to believe runs very deep and hand-in-glove with the propaganda. Life's hard and it's tough to be without a master. "Men don't become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest," writes Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, "the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained."
Propagandists' ability to mesmerize the faithful has increased exponentially as the technological life has increased and been promoted as de rigueur. This on-line life is propagated as a new religion whose embrace is said to be inevitable and whose faith one must accept as the missionaries for its miraculous nature spread the word far and wide.
Propagandists are smart people.
They hate freedom.
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