Dumber and Dumber - Campaign 2008

Meeting persons I haven’t seen in a long while, I am often – almost invariably, in fact – reminded during the first few minutes of conversation of something I said or argued many years ago. My friends say they’ve more recently become ruefully aware that events now vindicate what I said. The continued existence and (devastating) effects of Operation MOCKINGBIRD is but one example.

I suppose that I should feel good about that. I suppose I do – sort of. You see, I can’t help wondering why my friends weren’t convinced then. I’m no prophet. All my predictions were based on sound logic having to do with history – an intensive study of human behavior - and events of the time. Anyone who expected the corporations who as the result of World War Two became rich beyond even the limits of imagination to simply find a product other than armaments and their accoutrements obviously was making it clear that he knew nothing of history. That's just for instance.

Hence, I suppose Santayana’s comment concerning such people. We are, indeed, condemned by our ignorance of history.

The list of subjects over which I am winning arguments begun as many as fifty years ago, is a long one, but – for the purposes of this example (I’m just too old to really give a damn about vindication or the like) – here are a few:

While still in high school, I had done mathematics and trials necessary to know that the one hundred, thirty grain rifle bullet in two seventy caliber was the best choice – performing best in all situations – for a military rifle, especially for snipers. Nevertheless, the fact that the calculus maximum of all the relevant data leaves no doubt had no effect on those arguing, for instance, for calibers like 30-06. After years of argument, the military of the United States has finally, fifty years later, decided the same thing. The Army’s new rifles will be in six point eight caliber - .270.

In 1956, when I wrote the first paper arguing that the U.S. should organize and develop Special Operations teams like today’s Delta, SEAL-6, and others, it proved damaging to my military carrier. When I reprised the idea in 1967 in a paper entitled “Hostage Situations – Special Weapons and Tactics, the college professor’s assistant who graded the paper wrote “lunacy” across the bottom. With SWAT and special operations teams now having been and continuing to be organized everywhere on the planet, my name somehow remains conspicuously absent in all the discussion. Gee, what a surprise!

In that first SWAT paper, I said that given a fifty caliber rifle, I could kill a hostage-taker at two thousand yards, and recommended that the U.S. Army develop a sniper rifle in that caliber. That drew hoots of derision, too. During the birthing years – literally, decades – of the Barrett Fifty and others the like . . . well, you know. It’s that kind of country.

When, in 1953, I told farmers back home that to do any kind of business with the government – the “soil bank” and government purchase and storage of crops was the issue, then - was to shoot oneself in the foot, I drew the same derision as I would get a few years later concerning rifle calibers, SWAT, and the like. When government had begun the wholesale bankrupting and handover to large corporations of most of the nation’s family farms (and if you can’t figure out why that should have been planned and brought to fruition, you really haven’t any idea of history), friends I spoke to then now remark that I was right.

Just as anyone who doesn’t realize that the cheap prices the U.S. has enjoyed since World War Two despite staggering taxation for the purpose of arms spending were paid for by farmers and ranchers, anyone who doesn’t understand that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and national recovery from the Great Depression was built on the backs of farmers and ranchers just hasn’t been paying attention; which is to say "has succumbed to Operation MOCKINGBIRD propaganda," that is.

Several of those I advised to avoid government as a business associate and refrain from ruinous borrowing, however (those who concomitantly refused lures to purchase massively expensive equipment and methods, for instance) would at the eventual time of eighteen percent interest rates credit me with saving their farms.

It goes on and on, and there are many, many people who will tell you that what I say here is true.

Which brings me to my subject for today, the sinking feeling I get each time I watch and listen to the current presidential campaign and news of it. My god – this is the best we can do? Now the Democrat Party candidates are bickering about choice of clothing! A few weeks ago, one got teary-eyed in an effort to get sympathy (I guess we’ve forgotten the old male wisecrack that crying by a woman during an argument is blackmail, huh?).

On the other side politically, the Republican Party’s leading candidate (how these people – I mean both parties – have the damned nerve to use those titles in this day and age is also beyond imagination) has the colossal daring to say that he doesn’t care if we’re in Iraq for a hundred years. With nearly eighty percent of the U.S. public vehemently opposed to the occupation and war in Iraq, what does that tell you? What does the fact that while an overwhelming portion of the public wants illegal immigration stopped, and the illegal immigrants forced to go home, John McCain has suddenly become sanctimonious – “they’re children of god” (John, the scores of thousands in iraq we’re maiming, killing, irradiating with depleted uranium, and a dozen witch’s brew things more, aren’t children of god, too?).

What does John McCain know that we don’t?

Just like John McCain and all the rest of his fellow “candidates” know perfectly well – and knew at the time and prior – that satellites over Iraq in the years before the invasion told the president there were no weapons of mass destruction there (a fact obviously known to Saddam Hussein and just as obviously the reason the Iraqi dictator acted as he did in the years prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom). John McCain and the rest of these actors in the current presidential charade know damned well why “news” like that is thunderously conspicuous by its absence from the supposedly all-knowing media.

They know, too, why it’s never once been mentioned in the halls of the U.S. Congress. And they know why it’s never mentioned in these “debates.” John McCain and his partners in crime, the U.S. Congress, know that a class of eighth-graders could successfully impeach George W. Bush.

John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and all of these miserable frauds know why Internal Revenue Service with its appalling record remains in existence and above the law.

Of course, I could go on and on. I pay attention to history (that’s while you - assuming you're a typical member of the public - are watching sappy soap operas or the male minimalist equivalent, reading tabloid magazines, doting on boyish nonsense like the fraud of today’s professional sports or sucking up pornography with your computer, and fifty things more the like, that is).

But what John McCain and the rest know is that this election is a fraud, a made-for-television parody of politics. They know this is the equivalent of a pro wrestling championship, with the script written long in advance by agreement of the parties. They know that no matter which of them “wins” the championship belt, it will have utterly nothing to do with control of the nation, or anything they are promising.

That anyone who has lived in this country for the past fifty years can have any doubt about that is stupefying. Only the just-about-impossible-to-believe stupidity of the U.S. public can explain the fact that a charade like the election we’re seeing is being taken seriously. One might observe things like the fact that in a 2006 poll nearly half of persons eighteen to twenty-four years old don't think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. With the country more than four years at war – killing and being killed in the scores of thousands – only twenty three percent of people with college learning locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

And, of course, that’s the tip of the iceberg. People I interviewed only a few years ago identified Pearl Harbor as a shampoo, for instance. More recently, at the time of the World Trade Center attack, when a television “anchor” (nice term, come to think of it, for people who are about as bright as the typical boat mooring) compared the terrorist strike with Pearl Harbor, folks having coffee at my hang-out of the time obviously had the Japanese attack confused with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Anyway, a woman said, she knew it happened in Vietnam.

Remember the woman I mentioned recently, the one who thought Europe was a country, and had never heard of Hungary?

John McCain, Hillary, and the rest of these charlatans know the people of the U.S. are stupid enough to believe anything. They know that the people of the U.S. are interested only in their own, personal and solipsistic security and happiness. To hell with anything that doesn’t contribute directly – and immediately – to me and my ego. “Where ignorance is bliss,” wrote English poet Thomas Gray, “’tis folly to be wise.”

This, incontrovertibly, is a nation of people who - on account of effeminate humanism and the Operation MOCKINGBIRD plotters who spawned, reared, and exalted the neurosis feminism and its like - believe that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing" and "there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion” (sound familiar?). Science has become subordinated to popular opinion, with the result, for one instance of such among many, that few people see any reason that creationism shouldn’t be taught in our schools along with evolution.

A public too stupid to calculate a fifteen percent tip on the check at the restaurant or identify the outline the outline of their own country on a map insist upon trusting their opinion concerning science and physics like the origins of the universe.

Somehow, the “spin-doctors” of the MOCKINGBIRD media and educational system inveigled the public into preferring opinion and ideology to science, and turned into college-level learning minimalist nonsense and trivia things like "Women’s Studies," “Ebonics,” rock music, "pop culture," and more. Nothing was too ridiculous to be included in college-level learning. People graduated from college without having learned to read and write.

Not only have the people of the United States become abjectly, pitifully, ignorant of essential scientific, cultural, and legal matters, they don’t even realize that such things matter.

No matter which of life and existence’s vicissitudes befalls us, citizens of the U.S. believe, the nebulous “they” will do something.

McCain, Hillary, and the candidates - and those who actually rule in the U.S., too – know that our obsession with happiness has been carefully fed and nurtured for exactly that purpose. Operation MOCKINGBIRD, (together with the federally co-opted education system) spawned in the fifties, then reared in the sixties, ideologies like militant feminism and its humanistic sociological siblings. The obsession with hedonistic self-interest and the tenets of secular capitalism were easily wed, and their miscreant issue was an historically sudden extinction of the creative impulse, the “know-how” that once distinguished among all the peoples of the world the people of the United States.

The people once famed for their individual independence of thought, their mental toughness, and resourcefulness became in a few generations a nation of herd animals, whose idea of taking care of oneself has become knowing how to find help in the yellow pages.

That, of course, paralleled the degradation of the male, J.S. Mill’s “dwarfing of … men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands….” But don’t let’s get me started on that issue. Suffice it to say that it was incontrovertibly part of the “dumbing down” of the nation that has brought us to the sorry state of affairs we see being paraded with breath-taking chutzpah and temerity today.

The Academy Awards given last night to Hollywood’s actors should have been awarded to the political candidates in this tawdry presidential campaign.

THIS IS IMPORTANT, people (god a-mighty - it occurs to me that I'm talking to people who consider news of Brittney Spears "important" )! This is not the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts) Awards. This is not about who is “most popular.” It’s not about who can shake her ass fastest while she shrieks lyrics to some who-will-remember-in-a-week “song.” It’s not about some child-man who scores a touchdown or a basket, then postures like a conquering hero of history as though he has done something earth-shaking. It’s not about some misfit moron reciting dip-shit doggerel rhythmically into a microphone. It’s not about any of scores more of “celebrities,” jocose jackasses – the clowns become presidential candidates included – who by virtue of some piddling skill happen to have been in the right place at the right time and were made famous.

The fact that the bell curve juxtaposed with today’s information technology multiplies by millions the individual's ability to prevail upon one of his fellows to listen or watch his performance means likewise the ability to repeat the five or ten dollar value of his performance millions of times does not change the five or ten dollar value of one’s ability or person.

This is about things as life-or-death important as global warming, environmental crises, or nuclear war.

I pause, to overcome the sickening realization that the majority of people who would otherwise control the most powerful military in human history – a military capable of destroying the planet scores of times – are more interested in knowing who it was who won the Academy Award. It’s worse than that: the people who would otherwise control a nation capable of producing and operating dozens of nuclear aircraft carriers, scores of nuclear submarines, and thousands of nuclear ICBMs – who can destroy civilization in a few hours – are as nonplussingly stupid as we have seen demonstrated of late.

They are so god-damned (and I use the term advisedly) stupid that they believe this is an election, an election to choose who will hold the highest office in the land, and the individual who will might decide to end civilization.

How stupid can you get? Check with Operation MOCKINGBIRD – they, after all, wrote the book.