Postcard from the Propagandist

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It’s a bombardment. Up, down, left and right. Inside out and upside down. An onslaught. Back and forth, to and fro, here and there and back again. A blizzard of threats. A maelstrom of lies which prey upon your worst fears.

Invading hordes of coloreds. An avalanche of disaster. Moral depravity and economic catastrophe. Politicians and Piranhas swim the tank of bottom feeding frenzy. And you are fish food.

No where to run and no place to hide caught in the web of surveillance and submission. Red shirts, green shirts, brown shirts, hair-shirts and rabble-rousers line up to mimic revolutions past and become the canon-fodder of warning and example for those angry enough not to take it anymore but unable to screw their courage to the sticking place. No sacrifice is too great except the sacrifice of sticking one’s neck out while everyone else watches the beheading on the ubiquitous bandwidth of fair and balanced public relations designed to foster consumption and debt.

Be angry and afraid. Emotions encouraged to run wild, the better to identify the trouble-makers. As the screw turns mobs are shot down in the streets. Liberty takes a back seat to ‘order.’ The security of the rich and the few is paramount. The fate of the many seal their doom with complacent ambiguity. The propaganda of fear and loathing settles into the marrow like cancer; an epidemic of blame; a pox on everyone’s house. The citizenry, a circular firing squad given ammunition by those standing outside the circle.

You have been dumbed, numbed and plumbed. Your brain is fried, your mind is muddled and your entrails poisoned with additives, supplements, steroids and barbiturates. Game Theory knows your every move. Chemistry knows your psychology. We know what you are thinking because we put the thought in your head. We know what you are feeling because emotions are birthed by the thoughts we inject like saline to the dehydrated. You are thirsty to believe what you are taught and hungry for the red-meat of emotional roller-coasters.

When everything feels like the movies, you bleed just to know you’re alive.

Surrounded by slapstick stupids and bitch-slap crazies you circle the wagons and shoot at anything that moves. You hunker down in your Barcalounger bunker to sweat-out the nuclear winter of economic collapse. You dumpster dive for crumbs. You hunt and peck for scraps. You take care of your own and others be damned. You play by the rules. You do the right things. You go along to get along.

And where has it got you other than a clean conscience on the road to serfdom? You’ve been taught everything is a cycle and this too shall pass. You are promised a better world is just around the next bend on the corkscrew of life.

You pray for justice while the Cult of Blankfein sucks the life-force from society and craps on the rug of the American Dream. You pray for change as they put a black bag over your head and rendition you for resisting your birthright as slave. You pray for death as they torture you with the laughter of sadists and the cruelty of impotence. Your children are taken from you, drugged, indoctrinated and taught to rat-out non-conformity and critical thinking. Mean girls. Drunk boys. Bad seeds.

Every few years you are encouraged to believe in hope again and then taught to smile as hope is dashed against the rocks of reality. Abandon all hope for those who enter here. Where the hell do you think you are? In some kind of feel-good Frank-Capra-Jimmy-Stewart morality play with a few laughs, crocodile tears and the obligatory happy ending? Sure, we gave you that propaganda during the the Great Depression and the Great War to take your mind off of food rations and body-bags. But you have been conditioned for sterner stuff now. No stinking happy endings for you. There is no prosperity ahead. It’s all been done. We’ve done communism, fascism and capitalism. We’ve done the propaganda of nationalism, humanism and religion. Pop, pop, pop. What is left? The money is gone, the cupboard is bare. After the looting, comes the escape and unless you are one of the looters there is no escape. Form a posse if you want and go on a wild goose chase for truth, justice and the American Way. What is the American Way except an excuse for Oligarchy in the name of Democracy.

War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery.

More than Party slogans, but public policy. You can’t have people running free. That is madness. You have to make people believe they are free, while under the strictest control. Sure the Tea Party was a popular revolt for about a weekend until it was co-opted by Party bosses and crime syndicates. Sure there was a Progressive outcry against war, corruption and injustice until it was co-opted by the Al Jolson minstrel show of Change, Hope and a Sucker Born Every Minute. The new President loves the smell of napalm and crispy fried kids in the morning.

Isn’t it obvious what the game is, what is the score? Isn’t it obvious to everyone with a Scarecrow’s brain? After 10,000 years of the same game with the same result you’ve got to ask the question? How do they do it? How do they fix the game? How do they win every single time?

First they make you believe a lie is the truth – The King rules from a birthright granted by the Gods. Then when that wears off after a few centuries, they feed you another lie as truth – The Church, infallible, rules by the Will of God. Then another – The Constitution is Law passed to us by the Creator – and another – Goldman Sachs does God’s Work. And if you ever stop believing they shoot you in the head in front of your children and say to the kids, “You believe it don’t you?”

This is Propaganda. Bernays named it Public Relations, because Propaganda has a bad connotation with the common man. The purpose of propaganda is to manage the thoughts and behaviors of the public through the propagation of one-sided information. The goal of Propaganda is to influence. To make you believe something someone else wants you to believe for that someone else’s political or economic benefit.

“Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels.”

Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States

Irish are drunks. Italians are thugs. Jews are greedy. Lazy, shiftless Negroes want to sleep with all “our” white women. Mexicans are coming to take away all our jobs. Feminists and liberals want to destroy Family. Terrorists are coming to make us all Muslims. If it weren’t for Capitalism there would be no jobs. Communism is a menace. Labor is socialism. Business is Democracy. Wealth is success. Poverty is failure. Everybody loves a winner. America is the greatest country in the history of the world.

The Few has always ruled over the Many. Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Plutocracy, Theocracy has always been the way. Slaves, serfs and servitude has always been the way.

Why? Because the many has been taught to believe in the divine right of kings. There is a natural order, a natural law, to top-down society because that’s the way it’s always been. To question the legitimacy of authority is to question nature, the history of humanity and God in one fell swoop.

And through this nature, history and faith, human civilization is on the brink of self-annihilation. If this was the way it was supposed to be wouldn’t the result be the definition of good? Isn’t Creation supposed to be good?

But instead we have civilization-fail. The height of technological wonder has brought heights of war, poverty, disease and the evil of man’s inhumanity to man. The Few get fewer and the Many get more. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

All it would take to change the way things are and the way they’ve always been is for the many to sweep away the few in a fit righteous indignation in the name of ‘enough is enough.’

But they don’t. Why? Because the few pay people like me to convince you not to. Don’t question 911, go shopping instead. Leave it to experts, leaders and managers to fix what’s broke and don’t rock the boat. We keep things coming at you at a rocket pace, future shock, so things from yesterday go down the memory hole today. What stolen elections? What WMDs? What lies? What corruption? What promises? What change?

There is only today. And today you might lose your job or your house or your life. Just take care of yourself and let the process take care of everything else. It’s worked okay this far. Sure things aren’t perfect, but they could be worse. You could be an Afghan or African or Greek. So, take it one day at at time. Don’t look back. Don’t look ahead. All there is is now. This moment. And your purpose is to live through it.

You can’t fight city hall. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

God will sort it all out later.