Of Blowhard Hypocrite Individuals, Blowhard Hypocrite Nations, and Sea Changes.

As one who has almost literally been everywhere, seen everything and done everything, I am seldom surprised at anything a human being does. A few days ago, having heard that Rush Limbaugh, railing in his customary fashion against anything left of Attila the Hun, called someone a “phony soldier.”

Rush Limbaugh! Rush Limbaugh the bloviating bottom-feeder of the right-wing media, the pompous prince of perissologia, the Brahmin of bombiphiologia, and the White Houses Uriah Heep; the craven, crawling, pill-popping, self-indulging sop who dodged the draft during the Vietnam era by way of a pilonidal cyst (an ingrown hair) on his corpulent ass! Man, the soaring hypocrisy of a Rush Limbaugh calling someone - anyone - else a “phony” is astounding, stupefying – like watching a guppy morph into a whale. At the rate this guy is going, "a Rush Limbaugh" will one day serve as periphrastic reference to loud-mouthed, bloviating, hypocrisy. I can think of no one in history more archetypical.

Only one person encountered during my lifetime rivals this Colonel Blimp for outrageous remarks, that being Limbaugh’s Jack Spratt counterpart in reverse, Ann Coulter. The fat loudmouth and the emaciated loudmouth lead their mentally scrofulous cohort on FoxNews and the ridiculously Rabelaisian right, seemingly willing – striving, even - to say absolutely anything contemptible and disgusting. It’s as it they’re intent – hired, maybe – upon testing the limits of free speech.

It’s something, however, I hope they continue; and I deplore those on the left who seek to shut them up. This Senator Jack S. Phogbound of the Dogpatch White House media, together with FoxNews’ emaciated harridan harpy Coulter speak for me and anyone actually conservative or moderate – the extreme left is too similar in method and too similarly engaged to notice - with everything they say.

There is no way anything I could say would make either look more ridiculous than they themselves already do.

Having said that, however, I am reminded of recent comment concerning my essay on the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to weigh in on the matter of torture. Like the statistically documented majority of our citizenry, most people in the world of “blogging” seem to wonder – demand, even – “what can be done.”

The great majority of U.S. citizens disapprove of both their president and congress – I hope that is also the case with our national Bartelby the Scrivener Supreme Court – and are dumb-founded to realize that it means nothing where the behavior and actions of their nation are concerned.

Well, now! Fancy that. Take the tabloid gentry like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, and their tawdry horse manure masquerading as thought from their scum-sucking public, the U.S. public at large would become a lemming-like mass migration to whatever equivalent of oblivion they might find – something like another Princess Dianna, Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, smut-fest. The nation perennially stupefied by the CIA Operation Mockingbird Media writhes in its intellectual death throes, its metastasizing brain releasing the creature’s bowels like those of a dying whale. Unfortunately – to use the broadest euphemism possible – parts of the body politic remain healthy and sane, yet forced to participate in the mindless spasms and resulting insult to itself and whatever of its former dignity remains. Ripped from one Brobdingnagian extreme to another, paralysis to spasm, we ride the dying giant like a flea on a Mastodon, helpless to leave.

Shit (pun, perhaps, intended and apropos)! It’s like being the normal and sane child being reared in a home for the retarded. “One flew east and one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” We cannot free ourselves from the Looney Tunes left or the Nurse Ratched right.

The extremist - whether true-believer, neo-conservative, and knee-jerk liberal, after all - is like a guy who plans a car trip by laying a compass on a map, noting the direction and determining that he will drive exactly in that direction without deviation. No matter the curves and turns, corners and intersection with other streets, roads, or highways, no matter what may happen en route, he will drive straight ahead – “damn the torpedoes.” And damn anybody who happens to get in the way.

Ah, well. In response to my friend Steve (whom I mentioned here last time, too), I made the following observation:

Steve,

No, actually this predates Goebbels and Hitler by centuries. All the way back to Julius Caesar and "divide and conquer." The Mockingbird Media tactic is known to propagandists as "System Overload or System Collapse." This is based on the fact that any cybernetic or reasoning system faced with conflicting data simply waits until the scales (as it were) tips one way of the other. Keep the system fighting with itself, it stays frozen or overloads (remember the Star Trek segment wherein Captain Kirk asked "Vger," the thing destroying galaxies and headed toward Earth such a question?)

Today's right and left media use this ploy continually. It's insidiously beautiful, because it appears so democratic. More, immigration, both legal and illegal, have much to do with the astonishing state of our society and government. We have factionalized thereby the nation to a degree many of us never thought possible, with the national discourse having become much like most of the Sunday morning "panel" shows, wherein everyone tries to shout everyone else down, and the audience can have no idea what the hell is going on, much less what is being discussed.

A corollary is the tax system. Completely chaotic, no logic rhyme nor reason possible, it makes IRS a de facto dictator. The great wonder is that a nation having lived under anything as obviously unconstitutional and “un-American” as the tax code can wonder at an electorate powerless to do anything about Iraq, the border with Mexico, the health care mess, or a dozen more issues similar.

What the hell would anything rational expect? How the hell can anything even basically paying attention continue to parrot mindless myths portraying that as democracy? What - the meaning of the word has changed like so many others?

Anyway, here we are. With all the nation's factions screaming to demand what THEIR ism, asm, spism, or spasm wants, the military industrial complex and its puppet government does exactly what it damned pleases. Check Iraq, the Mexico border, education, and dozens more. It's divide and conquer, all right. Ann Coulter, Keith Olberman, Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly and the rest are team-mates working on the same project.

Trust me, amigo - I've been watching and studying this all since I was a kid. More, when I was still in high school, and had delivered a rather impassioned speech about the wonders of our system of government, my grandfather chuckled. "The Constitution is like a bit in a horse’s mouth. The horse doesn't want that bit there, and if he gets a chance, he spits it out. To let the government’s courts protect the Constitution is like letting a horse decide how tight the bridle should be."

Like so many things my grandfather told me, I never forgot that. If the poeple don't enforce the Constitution, no one will. They haven't and we've lost it. It's that simple.

Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Operation Mockingbird works.

Like many others of late, my friend, you begin to recognize what my own studies of the national discourse long ago revealed. Each website I have more recently joined - left and right - has this information and logic-less tic-tac-toe sort of thing as its sine qua non. Like I said, wonderfully paralyzing to the national discourse. Mockingbird "judo" works. The result is that NO reasoning occurs. The public couldn't agree on putting out the garbage.

For a dictator, perfect.

Hal
P.S. "Judo" is to say “use the enemy’s strength against him.” In a democracy, use democracy to make the free enslave themselves. Remember Gibbons' quote about the Athenians?

Unless some kind of new Age of Enlightenment occurs, the Human Race faces cataclysmic change. We’re not only in serious trouble, but – thanks to the Mockingbird Media – and an education system even deeper in the toilet than the rest of the nation’s societal systems - we have no idea that we are. I don’t suppose there is any way, really, to sound the alarm – to do that would require shouting louder than the likes of FoxNews – but what the hell:

As we enter twenty-first century, the world is in the midst of three great and simultaneous revolutions, each one of immense significance historically and scientifically. One is revolt of the world’s people against totalitarian rule, revolutions like those in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, China, and the Soviet Union. Profound democratic change is also underway in South America and Southern Africa.

After decades of geopolitical freeze, like the polar icepack, the ice seems to be breaking up. The one sour note, of course, is the totalitarianism of government by corporation. Driven to obey its prime directive - consume the planet and exploit its people, that is - humanity’s General Bullmoose must be put in his place before any true democracy can exist. A world governed as the United States is, by a five hundred, thirty-two member congress controlled by fifty-six thousand corporate lobbyists, will be no more free than the people of the U.S. are.

Dealing with the new Roman Empire long since established by corporate colonialism may well prove prohibitive.

Another revolution which is underway, after all, is that of globalization of the world's economy. U.S. hegemony of the rest of the planet by economic means, that is. Over the past twenty to twenty-five years there has developed an international struggle making many standard economic theories obsolescent or already obsolete. Rising world awareness of the U.S. Pax Romana seeks to end the long-held concept of national economies ruled by the U.S. dollar. Unifying more and more against U.S. economic colonialism, isolated and stultified local and regional economies of the world are increasingly awakening to exert their influence.

Nothing might more serve to demonstrate this fact than the concomitant rise of U.S. neo-conservatism. The economic natives have become restless, and the corporate white hunters seek means to pacify them while keeping them subservient and satisfied with status quo. Anyone who doesn’t agree “hates us for our freedoms.”

My mention of the word “prohibitive” as respects U.S. economic totalitarianism ought be considered by the individual as a means of tactical intelligence. Consider, for instance that with workers in the United States now competing not only with workers in other parts of their own country, but with workers in Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Mexico, and soon, probably even Eastern Europe, the heretofore large American corporations can scarcely, even, be called "American," anymore.

At the same time, neo-conservatism preaches its new form of Nazism and “lebensraum,” major corporate greed has resulted in U.S. corporate subsidiaries overseas, with factories, and even corporate management offices all over the world; that while smaller corporations unable to colonialize foreign nations seek to grow bigger by importing illegal aliens (the new slave labor) with which to supplant U.S. citizen workers from Mexico and elsewhere.

As the result, the international economy little resembles that of even twenty years ago.

Finally, there is the "information revolution," a technological sea change, which has played an important role in making the other two happen. Its implications where global consciousness of the human race are concerned can hardly be overestimated. This is a sea change affecting the seven seas, indeed, the entire water planet, with the explosive spread of computers and other information technologies, and more importantly, the impact of this technology is simply impossible to overstate.

International transmission of data now makes possible, and has provided for, even daily maintenance of business enterprises scattered all around the globe, with computers and computer-supported communication even transforming the nature of work, and creating a new international division of labor.

More, satellite technology has provided man with swift, sometimes even instantaneous, witness to events anywhere in the world. The further result is that all three of the revolutions I speak of here are feeding off one another, with internationalization of economic activity impossible without the rapid spread of the information technology.

Even further, many, or most, of the democratic revolutions all over the world would not have happened without the economic reform promoted by computer technology, and that these revolts and uprisings have spread so rapidly is due the availability of mass communications technologies like television, fax machines, satellites, and computers.

Frankly, I doubt that anyone can predict accurately the eventually total effect of the revolutionary process we are now in. Years ago, for instance – and on the other hand – I insisted to a number of my friends that the Internet would produce a candidate for President of the United States, and supplant the hideously transparent coup d’etat and military industrial complex corporation cabal now in power here. The rise of Texas Congressman Ron Paul speaks to the question of how accurate my prophesy was, as does the rise of Unity08. The coup plotters, fifty-six thousand Washington lobbyists, and other evidences of our death as a democratic nation will not go quietly, however, something that makes the future uncertain. Already, concerted efforts to stop the free exchange of ideas on the Internet are underway, most obviously in the form of the Bush Administration’s outrageous assault on personal privacy and other related aspects of the Bill of Rights. Using Operation Mockingbird devices like still another of its protection racket “wars” – a new War on Drugs called the “War on Pornography,” for instance – the government seeks to gain total control of computerized communication.

To the government – not only here, but with rulers everywhere - the Internet represents nothing less than the ability to think freely, to obtain information not filtered through and altered by the ruler’s media. It is the ability to relate directly with reality, rather than through an electronical cloud or fog erected by government. Mark well my words, there is no way they will tolerate that.

We are, in other words, at a watershed in human history. The poor, the heretofore ignorant and the therefore heretofore exploited, are about to discover why that is so. History is about, finally, to actually – without re-writing and re-structuring, without being taught by those to whom control of the reality that is history is most important – speak.

If you think that doesn’t represent a sea change, you haven’t been paying attention – meaning you were somehow separated from your forebears, from your parents and grandparents. You were taught, instructed, and shaped by those to whom your education was equivalent to today’s television “commercial.”

Chains and manacles, you know, aren’t the only way to keep – and make - a slave.