Saturday, May 05, 2018 7:18 PM
Intel (2018May05)
“They want everyone confused. Confusion is control.” – Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat)
Let’s rack’em up: The Trump camp is lying as if lying were an Olympic sport and they’re going for the gold. The Republicans are morally bankrupt from having created this arena of false outrage and false promises—the manure from which Trump first sprang. The Democrats are having a very hard time distinguishing ‘progressive’ from ‘push-over’. The voters are interested in their own lives—most of them don’t recognize how important political participation is for a healthy democracy—and don’t recognize how an unhealthy democracy can change their lives in very scary ways.
The media-verse wants to put on a show—not to perform public service. They make money by creating a compulsion to watch the ‘drama’. That’s why they persist in granting credibility to a president who wipes his ass with it. I mean, really, it’s been two years now that they’ve paraded on a bunch of wildly dishonest and serpentine spokesmen and spokeswomen for the Celebrity-Crook Administration.
Not a one of them answers a direct question. Not a one of them is capable of conceding a single point in any interview—that’s not stubborn—that’s stonewalling. When Trump is filmed in his out-and-out lies, they come on TV and say, “Get a sense of humor—of course he was joking.” I don’t know—would that be any less oily a defense, if Trump actually had a sense of humor? Not that it matters.
But by insisting on ‘fair and balanced’, the 24-hour-news businesses hammer these blatant scandals into some kind of sporting event, where they air first one side’s volley, then the other’s. It’s not journalism—it’s prestidigitation—keeping us mesmerized, so we don’t notice the whole thing has become a childish joke that the powers-that-be don’t have the humility to be ashamed of.
Friday, May 04, 2018 7:57 PM Subject: Patience
I needed time to rein in my outrage at the election upset. I finally resigned myself to it being as case of too much of the electorate being conned. If the bad guys can learn a new way to hack democracy, the good guys will find a patch, right? I calmed down and settled in for hard times.
I’ve strained to be patient for more than a year now, waiting for public officials of good will to find some way to depose the useful idiot, before Putin gains more say in policy than any American (and I think it’s pretty clear now that Trump is no American).
Besides, how has this jackass avoided a war or a market crash, making an infamy of himself while he spits on the flag and all it stands for? One time, during the campaign, he embraced and dry-humped an on-stage flag at a rally–he’s such a dick!
Oh, you poor intelligentsia—all your lives, most everyone you meet will seem dull or foolish. That’s the price you pay for being smarter than average—mathematically, the majority of other people have to be less quick—otherwise you wouldn’t be smarter-than-average. Even the adult’s programs on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) will seem geared towards children, compared to how quickly you can absorb information on your own.
And if you are so unfortunate as to become interested in politics, you will marvel at its blatant perversion into a tool of the rich and violent. And the far greater marvel is the potential, the capacity, which our technology has to transform this pre-industrial wage-slavery into a society ruled by all of itself, for all of itself.
Obstacle one: the feral nature of the rich and violent. They only use words to lie. They know the rest of us use words sincerely, so they add their lies to the mix—knowing that people believe anything they hear repeated often enough. Hitler invented the idea of whipping a whole country into a mob—and that technology has not gone undeveloped in the half-century since.
The idea that European city streets were winding and impractical—because those streets began as goat-trails and such, and the cities grew up adapting that old system, instead of replacing it—that’s always struck me as wonderfully human. But there is a social-meme version of the same thing, ideas that make society more tangled and confrontational—that we inherit from parents, teachers, elders, religious leaders—and, yes, politicians.
When Trump says ‘Mexicans are rapists’, who knows how he justifies such hate speech, such stupidity? His brain is full of goat tracks—worn down by his Klan-member daddy and his gangstoychik friends—plus all the spoiled coke-heads he clubbed with in the eighties. This ‘president’ can’t say for sure who he’s fucked—talk to his lawyer—talk to his lawyer—yeah, Donny—we’ll ‘check in’ with Cohen.
I blame Francis Ford Coppola—both Trump and Giuliani think it’s cool to rub elbows with cold-blooded organized-crime figures. Or is it ultimately Mario Puzo’s fault? I don’t know. We didn’t used to embrace crime so warmly. Maybe it was “The Sopranos” on HBO—maybe that over-normalized people whose business-model includes mass homicides.
