Say goodbye to the Enlightenment, and its touchstones: facts, logic, and reason. Our national mental life has entered a new Dark Age. An age where counterfeit assertions are accepted as honest facts; an age where self-serving excuses, based on those assertions, justify actions that implement pre-judged agendas.
The driving force behind this sea change in "worldview" (as if lies and manipulation could be called a worldview), is a totally corrupt corporate media. A media that spins only to the right. The corruption recently acquired a second layer: the counterfeit polling operations that serve up crooked statistics (as in lies, damn lies, and statistics) to be used to support the propaganda exercises the corporate media pretends are "facts" and "news".
Quite frankly, the corruption is so deep, the lying so pervasive, that facts, logic, and reason don't have a chance (unless you are a complete political junkie AND have a very strong grasp of historical facts). The average low-information voter is completely lost. He has no basis to separate truth from lies because he gets his information from a corrupt media.
Case in point: Joe Biden. In his debate, he did a terrific job of exposing the GOP lies, the phony excuses for inhumane policies, the Reverse Robin-Hood agenda. And what did the corporate whores say? He was "too aggressive". Down the memory hole for you, the version of Mitt Romney that talked over Jim Lehrer. Also down the hole: loudmouthed thug, Chris Christie, and shotgun wielding Dick Cheney.
That's the frame of this "big picture" diary. Below the fold, I present an eight-point GOP agenda that would gag a buzzard.
Despite the internet, we still live in an age of mass media. Corporate media pronouncements, for political purposes, still define what reality is - even as they diverge massively from reality. They diverge because the corporate propaganda media is the bought and paid for subsidiary of the neoliberal counter-revolution. The same counter-revolution that brought decades of misery to Latin America. The same counter-revolution documented by Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine". And now the 1% has accumulated enough power to strip-mine the US - and to get a near-majority of deluded suckers to vote for it.
I am a boomer. I was brought up to respect facts, to fight racism and other forms of discrimination. But today's media makes a mockery of everything that I was taught, every effort I made to engage with and understand the world. Now, any part of reality, even scientifically-documented reality, that is deemed "inconvenient" is either ignored or labeled a "conspiracy theory". Climate change? A conspiracy. Fraudulent voting machines. A conspiracy theory. The complete corruption that is Citizens United? Never heard of it. The horrible statistics on inequality and every other indicator of first world civilized behavior? Who cares? We're number one!
Gee, an alternative reality, where have I heard that before?
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the need of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
The truth is that we live inside a "financial black hole" created by obscene amounts of money buying every media outlet, judge, and legislator in sight. We are inside the "event horizon", unable to escape the financial gravity that will crush us - think of "austerity" as gravity and you will get the picture. The difference between the GOP and the Dems is that the Dems are trying, however futilely, to move away from the crushing singularity at the center of the black hole, while the GOP wants to accelerate towards it.
Make no mistake, the media may be the agent, but the result could not be accomplished without massive amounts of money. In an unregulated capitalist country, money IS power.
It takes power, not propaganda skill, to circulate a revised history of the Russian Revolution in which no man by the name of Trotsky was ever commander-in-chief of the Red Army.
- H. Arendt
The fact that this election is even close - after a year of GOP clown-car primaries, followed by the #romneyshambles overseas meltdown, in the face of unprecedented misogyny, recrudescent racism, and Ayn Rand worship - tells the tale for me. Either this country has gone past a tipping point to the right, or the media/polling complex is lying through their teeth. Either way, the propaganda groundwork has been put in place to excuse a third stolen election, brought to you by voting machines that are the private property of reactionary fundamentalists and the children of the Romney golem.
Because they know the fix is in, the GOP don't even bother to hide their loathsome agenda anymore. It is out in the open:
1. Roll back women's rights to the dark ages. Ban birth-control. Let them get raped; they asked for it and they enjoy it. Criminalize miscarraiges. Let them die to save fetuses. Deny them equal pay.
2. Make Christianist Sharia the law of the land, except for the elites. There is no such thing as Separation of Church and State. God demands that you vote GOP. And screw the IRS, we will say what we want and keep our deductions. Of course, GOP preachers, politicians, and talking heads are exempt from any moral police. They can screw anyone, cheat anyone, lie through their teeth; because you can lie for Jesus.
3. Rehabilitate the KKK and run the darkies out of the country. Guns for everyone. Concealed carry everywhere. Of course, armed minorities will be declared terrorists, while real, racist terrorists will be un-surveiled and given light sentences, if any, under the Castle Doctrine excuse for armed vigilanteism.
4. Crush the unions and the useless-eater middle class. Steal their life savings, take away their earned-benefit pensions. Force them to work crappy warehouse jobs. Hire and fire them like illegal migrants.
5. Don't prosecute the financial crooks. Instead reduce their taxes, turning them into a crooked, grasping aristocry. Let them continue to skim every stock transaction with computerized "front-running", aka High-frequency trading. Let them continue to rob everyone with usurious credit card fees, insurance claim denials, wage theft, and all the other nickel-and-dime chiseling that has been supercharged by computerization and deregulation.
6. Privatize what little is left of the government. Private prisons with guaranteed minimum populations already exist - what could possibly go wrong with private justice, privately administered?
7. Rape the environment. Drill everywhere, frack everywhere, blast anywhere, ramp up the tar sands and the pipelines. The US is just another third world hellhole from which resources are to be extracted without any consideration of the impact on the native population. Deny climate change until NYC is underwater, and then deny it some more.
8. Don't shrink the world's largest military and the world's largest prison system and the futile War on Drugs. Instead, expand the MIC; expand the police state. Tear up what little is left of our civil rights. Put more people in privatized jails that have become de facto mental institutions and breeding grounds for HIV and drug-resistant TB.
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This agenda is toxic, but is openly being touted by the GOP. If we had an honest media, a media that remembered the slightest bit of pre-corporate-dominated America, any of the items above should be enough to sink the GOP.
But, in the face of this declaration of war on our history, our Constitution, our environment, the corporate media plays stenographer, taking the "he said/she said" attitude that sells out reasoning with the excuse of balance and the assertion that "both sides do it". The media buys the excuses and the assertions, and studiously avoids examining the agenda of the billionaires who are looting everything of value. It connects the wrong dots, and can't even locate the right ones.
In the end, as a person trained to be rational, I no longer know how to "debate" frothing fundamentalists, gangster businessmen, and vigilante shooters when the media referees are crooked, lying jackals. Its like trying to debate with an inanimate bullet as it flies towards your chest. After years of a media hijacking, to the point where the broadcasts border on insanity, I have no faith that the truth will triumph in this country. I am afraid that big money has won by playing the long game of destroying the Enlightenment for fun and profit.
It was nothing new, either. My muse said it all a long time ago:
A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of the masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire their leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
- H. Arendt
I have no joy to give anyone. Reality sucks, but it is miles ahead of the poisonous lunacy the GOP is peddling.
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FWIW I'm voting Democratic, because any alternative is suicidal. I will not be surprised by any voting machine irregularities. Rather, I will scream bloody murder.
Based on what little honest reporting I can find, I expect that Obama really has a huge lead. How can two liars who have insulted, threatened, and demeaned just about every group except independently-wealthy, old, Christianist, white men have anywhere near 50% support? It is a mark of the media brainwash that even this obvious truth is contested - we see it in the disconnect in the reporting on battleground state vs national polls. Of course, the truth of GOP unpopularity does not factor in voter suppression and voting machine fraud, which will come into play on election day.
To me, America feels like Constantinople in 1453 - a besieged place being battered into submission by a huge army with a foreign religion. No one to come to our rescue. Just a matter of time before the last walls, that have held for centuries, are breached.
Cheers.