The Latest Churning of the Cesspool

Last night, as predicted by the corporate hack punditry since OBushma even took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the Republican party is once again ascendant. There are many a hung-over scumbagger this morning from the celebration to take the country back (unfortunately the imbeciles don't seem to give two shits where it goes now - right to the banks and corporations) from that horrible BLACK man in their WHITE House. Down here in the diseased penis of America more formally known as the state of Florida it is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Confederate Memorial Day all rolled into one. It never ceases to amaze me how an oily little snake like the newly crowned Senator Marco Rubio along with his Ricky Ricardo style pompadour could so easly bamboozle so many into believing that he was some sort of insurgent outsider when in actuality he was the protege of none other than Jeb Bush of the Bush Crime Family. The Governor of this state today is expected to be announced as a ghoulish looking scoundrel named Rick Scott, his resume shows that as head of HCA that he was forced out for participating in the largest case of Medicare fraud in history. As I write this the ballots are still being counted in where else but Palm Beach County, scene of the 2000 con job where the infamous butterfly ballots were blamed for elderly Jews voting for Pat Buchanan which was a marvelously effective cover story for the Bush Crime Family's election theft.

The breathless will be reaffirming to the brainless that this is the first win in the war against Socialism coming to America, nevermind that none of these wastes of flesh will have anything to say about the massive and ruinous updwardly directed Socialism later today when Helicopter Ben Bernanke sticks the sweet, sweet spike into the arm of the junkie banking system with is 1-4 trillions worth of monetary E Crack. The point is that the dimwits who went out and put the criminal Republican party back into official control of the cash spigots at the head of the trough of our putrescent political system are further confirmation that this country is finished. Stick a fork in our asses, we are done. There is not a dime's worth of difference between these two criminal entities that are the DemocRATs and the Republicans, one is only more fascist than the other and as is evident after Hope and Change was exposed as Bullshit and Lies. The neocons and the Republicans waged a crackerjack propaganda war as well as a textbook example of how to destabilize a country from within sans actual violence. Latching onto the disorganized Ron Paul/9-11 Truth Tea Party movement and then turning it into an exo-skeleton from which the deranged (but not too deranged to become a millionaire many times over) FOX demagogue Glenn Beck was able to climb into and rouse the peckerwoods who would then co-opt what really was a grass roots movement. Once hijacked by Beck and the ubiquitous Bill Kristol creation Sarah Palin the haters had a new vehicle that allowed them to rebrand the dregs of the base of the GOP, wrap the turd in the flag and get about trying to dislodge the nigger from their WHITE House.

And it worked, nearly to perfection too. The Republican criminals took back the House pretty easily (which will be churned again in two years) and could have seized the Senate were it not for some of the more crazy Palinistas such as anti-masturbation jihadist Christine O'Donnell and the demented Sharon Angle losing, the latter allowing good ole mobbed up Harry Reid to keep his job. The one truly great thing however was the takedown of the Weasel Queen Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, she can now ascend up the hills in San Francisco and retire to her mansion and you have to admit, John Boehner along with his fake crying jags is one hell of a lot more entertaining that shrill, squeaky shrew. As the great H.L. Mencken once remarked, "nobody ever lost money overestimating the intelligence of the American people" or something along those lines and Tuesday November 3, 2010 is proof of the pudding. Not that OBushma and the DemocRATs did themselves any favors, the compromising and corporate dealings took what could have been serious and lasting health care reform and turned it into a backdoor bailout of the insurance parasites (helped along by well-funded and well-organized Astroturf invasions of Congressional town halls by raving brownshirts) with the full power of the state directed against those who don't purchase their shitty products. Gitmo was never closed as promised, the wars have expanded into Pakistan and Yemen, the false flag terror plots that now seem standard tools for a U.S. President since the Bushreich have been used to justify more Draconian invasions of privacy and stripping of civil liberties - Bush could NEVER have gotten away with putting those naked body scanners into the nations airports. There was also the bailout of Wall Street, the phony stress tests, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and of course the mega rat Rahm Emanuel. There was also the smugness of liberals, many of whom I know and am laughing at this morning over their post-Obama election frenzy to instantly attack that most important of issues in these most terrible of times - institutionalizing gay marriage on a national level. Now I have nothing against gay people nor their getting married but get a clue you smarmy libs, there just ain't enough cod liver oil to make a huge amount of Americans who vote to swallow that one. Credit the pathetic remnants of the left with the churning,once they and their flagship party shanked unions and the working class in the back to cater to corporations and the endless aggrieved identity groups seeking to use the government to redress social ills they would forever have those millstones chained to their necks.

The DemocRATs did everything to fuck themselves and they were so good at it that the fucking was right up their collective poopers with Tabasco flavored lube. Take our political race here in Florida, they rolled out some dikey looking broad to run for Governor named Alex Sink whose ties to the banking industry seemed to not matter one bit over her resemblance to fake left heroine Richard Maddow on MSNBC and their choice to run against the criminally diseased Rubio was a black dude named Kendrick Meek who was once one of those trooper guards for Bubba Clinton when he visited the state. Call me a raving cynic but isn't the choice of two identity based minority groups as fodder to voters just a more elitist version of the Republicans pandering to the unwashed trailer trash and zoned out Jesus freaks? Why am I even writing about this crap? To vent I guess, I am certainly not childish enough to believe that it really matters much which of the two entrenched political parties actually is in power, nothing is going to ever change in this rotting country land of greed, sorrow and stupidity until the people get off of their fat asses, detach said fat asses from their living room sofas, unplug the umbilical cord leading to the television and take to the streets to purge this rancid system once and for all. Hell, look at the French and their recent uprising over the government's TWO YEAR change in retirement age. Meanwhile, here in Der Heimat, their civic duty completed, Americans can go back, pick up the remote and dial up the ballgame of the day or Dancing With the Stars.

What the fuck has happened to this country?

Star Spangled Land of Misfit Toys

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Eugenics American Style

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.

-Trent Reznor


I have seen the future and it is Idiocracy, a movie that is more outright horrifying than Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Brazil or any other dystopian vision because it is already happening. I'll get to that in a little while because something has been troubling me for a few weeks and I need to get it off my chest because it relates to the movie or could at least serve as a prequel. If ever there were to occur an American version of the Renaissance rest assured that it will not be centered in South Carolina, the capitol of peckerwood nation. The recent painfully embarrassing performance of Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton whose rambling, clueless and nonsensical answer to a question of why did she think that approximately 1/5 of young Americans were unable to find the USA on a map is a searing indictment of the mass stupidity that permeates this country today in the era of American Idol, Survivor and other simple-minded gravy for the brain that passes for entertainment post 9/11. Such incredible ignorance is a primary reason (along with rampant corruption and electoral fraud) that George W. Bush is the two-term reigning king of Idiot Nation. So thoroughly indicative was her example of damning this brain dead nation of shambling zombies whose gray matter has been rendered into so much mental mush as a result of the constant assault by charlatan politicians, too much religion, tabloid trash culture, too many video games and an overdose of television torpor that establishment boob Matt Lauer of the Today show had to feature her in a nationally televised do over in a desperate attempt to shore up confidence in the moronic progeny of Ronald Reagan’s shitheel generation that we really can't be that stupid can we? While being soundly defeated by fellow former Confederate states Mississippi and Alabama for the dubious honor of being the fattest state in the nation the embarrassing performance that was a smash hit on You Tube of Miss Teen South Carolina should ensure that the Palmetto State will remain among the largest bastions of ignorant, knuckledragging, regressive, red state fascist raptureheads in the Republican empire of the reconstituted Confederacy born out of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

Of course the south couldn’t have become the incubator of the ‘perfect’ American for the Republican thousand year reich without a good amount of that old time religion updated to mesh perfectly with the authoritarian types and their war on civilizations. That long haired liberal swine Jesus Christ had to be taught the error ways because a peacenik commie who preached against the evils of wealth was incompatible with his new role as pitchman for corporate dominance and global empire. Thanks to the influence of John Nelson Darby and assorted other lunatics with their premillennial dispensationalism that was juiced by the apocalyptic ravings of Hal Lindsay and later the highly influential Timothy LaHaye of the multi-million selling pulp trash Left Behind series Jesus V.2 now preached the gospel of ‘fuck the poor’, only walks on water when it is on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and flies through the skies with the help of an F-14 that he uses to drop napalm pods on brown-skinned Muslims to the delight of the zombies in the Rapture death cult.

Very little is as simplistic as an abandonment of reason and total surrender to religion as an escape from the cruelty of looter capitalism and the complexities of a technological society with no use for the dumb. It has always worked that way since the earliest civilizations with their worship of the sun god vs. the darkness devil and the promise of an afterlife to those legions of slaves who would taste nothing other than the whip of repression as they erected grand temples so that some rotten son of a bitch of an early version of today’s greedy and vainglorious psychopathic leaders could have his face carved onto on a statue or sphinx. Everything was a result of the favor or the anger of God or the even more simplistic and all encompassing master plan of the almighty. I have to simultaneously experience a sadness and a need to sardonically chuckle every time that some red state simpleton praises God for surviving the natural disaster that just wiped out everything that the rube had and this sort of childlike sort of primitive thinking is exactly what the cynical party bosses, CEO’s and war criminals want because a submissive drone with no actual concept of reality makes a good foot soldier. The astonishing level of national regressive thinking in the United States over the past quarter century or so has saddled the country with a mean-spirited, grossly ignorant and maladaptive blight of tens of millions who bear a large share of the responsibility for the erosion of American prestige, morality and economic might that have us teetering on the precipice of something really ugly that could come any day with a government full of war crazed ideologues, a financial system that has been rigged and manipulated by the avarice of the Gordon Gekko/Ayn Rand cult to the point where the entire fucking world economy is on the brink of collapse which is only further facilitated by the 24/7 running of the printing presses at the Federal Reserve and an indolent mass of television lobotomized consumers growing restive now all the credit cards have been maxed out and the rapidly devalued McMansion is no longer a piggybank. We are all fucked thanks to the morons responsible for gross abominations like the Creation Museum or the Holyland Experience and the wart on the ass of humanity that is the Bush administration.

But I digress.

About a month or two ago I caught Mike Judge’s brilliantly scathing Idiocracy on DVD, it was deemed unsuitable for any sort of widespread theatrical release by Fox Studios which deliberately buried it and has largely been ignored by a corporatist media obviously uncomfortable with the movie. The should be afraid because Idiocracy just fucking mocks the dumbing-down of American society that is largely the result of the deterioration of mass media, the rise of southern fried religion and the relentless war on the human condition by the rapacious plague of corporatization and a form of looter capitalism that has become cancerous. I have never seen a movie that is so in your face and that obviously made the Fox honchos very uncomfortable because they are largely a culprit in the ongoing process that has stupified what was once a well informed country with real values. The movie is a bit juvenile and overly loaded with scatological references but that is the point it is trying to make and those who don't get it bring to mind the famous poker saying that if you don't recognize the rube at the table it's you.

The plot features Army dullard Joe Bowers, a man of completely average intelligence and a prostitute named Rita who are the subjects of a secret military hibernation experiment of limited duration. Well things go awry and the officer in charge is ensnared by a sex scandal bringing shame and a base closure and a much longer nap for Joe and Rita who don’t wake up until they are freed from their test chambers during the great garbage avalanche of 2505. They wake up to find a world that is FUBAR, the infrastructure is crumbling and looks as though it were designed by idiots (or privatized out to greedy contractors skimming their cut at the expense of quality), the commercialization of society is complete with corporate logos everywhere and characters named after fast food and commercial products “Dr. Lexus”, “Frito” and “Beef Supreme” among them who speak in crude tongues, hurl insults and pejoratives and berate Joe for “talking like a fag”. It’s as though red state social engineering has created a Karl Rove style Republican dream of a reverse master race of abject morons with hair trigger tempers and a birthright of simplicity - George W. Bush’s anti-intellectualism on steroids. The entire population has become twentieth generation trailer trash who in a gross parody of Social Darwinism have outbred those with any intelligence or discretion. The opening few minutes that show how this happened are as classic as they are painfully true with the educated putting off reproduction while the rednecks breed like rabbits.

Centuries of consumerism and too much television have dumbed down the populace to the point of borderline retardation and the greatest advances in technology are huge multi-screened televisions, huge devices that allow for multiple reality trash programs to be presented simultaneously while the viewer is ensconced on a huge plush chair sucking down goo from a tub while reveling in the delights of shows the likes of Ass, Ow! My Balls and the Masturbation Channel. Those three examples are the descendents of current era moronic programming like American Idol, Jackass, The Biggest Loser and the explosion of potty humor as entertainment provided by movies featuring such Earthly delights as diarrhea daquiris, cacophonies of farts and belches, flying wads of semen used as hair gel and horny teenager boners buried in mom’s homemade apple pie that have made the society dumb and dumber as well as ruder and coarser. Corporations like Starbucks now offer handjobs as an enticement to buy a latte and Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers - the corporate satire is as hilarious as it is mostly absent from the media and society today and the part of the movie that takes place at St. God's Memorial Hospital with the health care system being reduced to a combination fast food joint/casino is down and out classic.

The society that Joe finds himself in is mean, greedy and stupid and the police are drooling overly agressive thugs. After a series of mishaps and an IQ test he is summoned to the White House by President Camacho because he is now the most intelligent man on the planet and up to the task of solving the food crisis that plagues America. The crops are dying because instead of using water (that stuff in the toilet) they are irrigated by mega selling sports drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Joe suggests using H2O and is met with incredulity by the mantra of "It's got electrolytes." After causing massive social unrest and unemployment with replacing Brawndo which happens to be the nation's biggest employer with his idea Joe is taken to an arena for a gladiatorial style event that is a wild combination between Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the local monster truck extravaganza that is televised on FOX which to no surprise is much the same as it is today other than the appearance of the anchors. Joe eventually triumphs and saves the day when the crops grow again and becomes a truly honored hero of Uh-merica. His best advice is to turn off the TV and read something once in awhile and everyone lives happily ever after.

It's good advice and should be heeded by a nation gone to seed who don't bother to pick up a book because the remote for the mind vacuum is much easier to heft and actually reading is just too much of a strain. An astonishing amount of the population don't even read one book a year let alone a newspaper. Another great suggestion would be to stop choosing politicians based on absurdities like the price of haircuts, their taste in foods (jelly beans, pork rinds), what type of pet they have, their stinking hypocrisy masked by their piety, their promise to open a can of whup ass on ‘terrorists’ and whether or not they are the type of guy that you kin have a beer with. With George W. Bush we have finally seen the rise of the ‘I am a dumbass and he talks just like me’ candidate and anybody who is that fucking dumb just can’t wrap their limited mental capacity around such a thing as a rigged election or two. The scariest thing is that it could get even worse with Fred Thompson, the pope of peckerwood nation being looked upon as a Reaganesque figure by many of the same dopes responsible for Bush Jr. and the threats by the degenerate, sociopathic freaks on the extreme ‘Christian right’ making noises about a third party – can you say Judge Roy Moore? Fred Thompson as a legitimate candidate is a prerequisite to the vulgar smack down champ in the White House in Idiocracy.

If anybody thinks that it is inconceivable that the country would one day be populated by retards if allowed to continue on its current course then they aren’t paying attention. Just pay a visit to your local Wal Mart, megachurch or shopping mall and do some people watching because the prototypes are everywhere. And let's face it, when the two most internationally known Americans are George W. Bush and Michael Jackson you know we have serious fucking problems and these are further compounded by the big news story of the day is about Britney Spears getting her California drivers license which only further illustrates that we are on the fast track to the land of Idiocracy.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry

-Don Henley - Dirty Laundry

Welcome to Blacksburg, Virginia – the place where flocks of mockingbirds turned buzzards and seeking to feast on fresh carrion swarm. The aftermath of the causes of the worst school shooting in the nation's history that claimed the lives of thirty three innocent people will be pontificated upon, spun and desecrated with the coming 24/7 saturation coverage on cable television news networks. Some media sources are already dishonestly playing up the massacre as the worst mass murder in United States history which is as intellectually dishonest as it is revisionist, a country build upon the killing fields that were a product of the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny does not have clean hands and there are many a state sanctioned slaughter of innocents in our closet. Gore Vidal is spot on correct in his reference to The United States of Amnesia although I might add willful ignorance and a deep seated callous indifference as well.

There will be much weeping and gnashing of the teeth in the guise of examination into exactly why this happened in the coming news cycles that will gobble up days, weeks and months.

The grand story of the shooter and what exactly drove him to wreak bloody havoc on that horrible April Monday morning, nearly eight years to the week after the murderous spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine Hight School has yet to be told. From early reports it was the standard stereotypical loner; a Korean born English student who wrote plays containing "macabre violence" and denounced others as "deceitful charlatans". As if that has any fucking thing to do with the price of rice in China. Among more notable literary figures with a penchant for the bizarre Stephen King has become a multi-millionaire writing stories containing “macabre violence” and I regularly rail against the abundance of “deceitful charlatans” that pollute this sick and terminally fucked up society and neither of us are mass murderers. Movie scripts like Saw and Hostel spawn smash megaplex hits by offering graphic depictions of sadism and violence and they gross millions so the writings of Cho Seung-Hui are yet another canard, a red herring used to justify the violent acts that are inevitable in a society that regularly worships at the temple of bloodshed and cruelty. You can always count on the public relations flacks masquerading as journalists for more wildly over-hyped horseshit and manufactured storylines to mesmerize the pathetic and bewildered herds of sheeple that have overrun television nation.

Careers are made off of stories like this and the fact that an ambitious ‘journalist’ could grab a ride on the riverboat, a seat on the gravy train and experience an O.J. Simpson moment is forefront in many minds of the death sucking vultures of the mainstream media whores. They are chasing ambulances as though they were white broncos. They descended on the ruins of the Gulf Coast not that long ago scavenging like feral rats in dumpsters amidst the debris of a ruined city rife with the stench of rotting food and bloating corpses, of misery and of the raw musk of ambition that fuels careers in the disgraceful fucking excuse for a media that this country has been stricken with. They rooted through the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and then they were gone and while great swaths of New Orleans still lie ruined they moved on to the next big thing - John Mark Karr, Bennifer, Suri Cruise, Baby Brangelina, Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith or the child murdering pederast of the week. It is always the same – only the names change but mass murders in schools can be career makers. Of course the usual suspects were already picking out their Hokie memorabilia to shamelessly display while the bodies were still being autopsied – Paula Zahn, Geraldo and a pack of other lesser known predators seeking to pick whatever meat remains on the bones of dignity in America’s latest and greatest grand ratings spectacle. Fuck them all, they are vermin who only serve to perpetuate the culture of tabloidism, violence, death and celebrity.

"Seeing him descend bright-eyed and sweaty on wretched New Orleans, as he did in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, was like watching a vulture on crystal meth. The word that came to mind was not 'reporting,' but 'feeding.”

-Critic Tim Rutten on Geraldo Rivera

This latest horror of a society gone to seed is good death- mass murder, dread, fear, ratings – not bad death, the bummer of the war dead and the hundreds of thousands of non-Christian, brown skinned victims of a gross savagery undertaken in the name of freedom, freedom to watch cable television and the good death. The type that can be exploited, that pleases the sponsors and the political apparatchik seeking to point the fingers at monsters rather than themselves. I am dead certain that Karl Rove was so ecstatic to see the slaughter at Virginia Tech knock war, deleted emails, Gonzo and the rot of empire out of the headlines that he made some popcorn and pulled up a seat in front of his plasma flatscreen to enjoy the show. Millions of American ghouls joined them in front of their own glowing living room false idols. This is big time shit, never mind that far worse slaughters happen in Iraq every fucking day – 55 more of those whose lives are like mere insects or rodents in terms of their relative value compared to ordinary Americans were added to the tab of the war pigs yesterday.

But I digress…Never mind the actual victims they will still be dead come the next news cycle and there are grieving families to interview and shaken survivors to prod for the little bloody exclusive details of their moments when certain death passed them over and took their classmate, their lovers, their friends.

There are also precious political points to be scored.

There will be those who use this to further implement the creeping police state, surveillance companies will base their entire marketing campaigns on this tragedy. Right wing lackeys seeking to pander to their base will decry that every person in America is not required by law to wear a sidearm and the pathetic timorous candy asses of the Democrat wing of the war party will rail and demagogue against firearms in their run up to Hillary’s coronation in 2008. Their efforts to spin the killing spree in Blacksburg for the sake of scoring cheap political points is as shameless exploitation of the dead and the dishonoring of the bereaved loved ones as is George W. Bush’s latest photo-op at the Virginia Tech campus for today’s memorial where instead of the typical soldiers and snowflake babies he used the mourning students and families as stage props.

The neoliberal fake left (fittingly referred to as such after their treacherous sellout of labor by the parasitical DLC whose taste for corporate cash, war, globalization and special interest groups is an abysmal disgrace) is no better, quick on the draw to blame it all on the NRA and the availability of guns seeking to take a stand against the wrong highly influential lobby that is killing America. Knee jerk, politically expedient attacks on restricting gun ownership by party hacks at the same time that an unaccountable private army named Blackwater grows stronger by the day is a grave and dangerous threat to liberty. Thousands of trained killers for hire who are unchecked by any law and given carte blanche by the scofflaws of the militant Republican junta are a clear and present danger within our borders and a menace as unseen before in our history. If there was ever a time to strongly support a well-armed militia this is it.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and a society that exalts violence whether it be the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Jack Bauer breaking fingers, the blasphemous apocalyptic filth that permeates mega-church congregations or the latest in high tech, mega pixel slaughterhouses offered up by the video game industry should not be surprised when the carrion birds come home to roost.

TV Evil: Through The Glass Darkly

TV EVIL

"I am gross and perverted, I am obsessed and deranged, I have existed for years but very little has changed, I am the tool of the government and industry too for I was destined to rule and regulate you…I’m the slime oozing out of your tv set"

-Frank Zappa from 'I Am The Slime'

"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line."

-Earling Carrothers ‘Jim’ Garrison

"We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion."

-Howard Beale

As with all other things, television can be used for either good or evil depending on the intentions of those who control it. Karl Marx once said that religion was the opium of the people, he was only partially right, had he possessed the alleged ability of Nostradamus to glimpse into the future he would see that religion as powerful as it may be as an ‘opiate’ could be blown away by an innovation of technology that was still nearly a century away, a medium with the potential to become the ultimate societal drug, one far more powerful than any other: television aka, the electronic crack pipe

…..oooooh daddy, give me a hit of that e-crack!

Television has in the course of the last fifty years become such a potent force of the infinite possibilities of mass mind control and public manipulation that there is no way that the government could possibly ignore it as a tool to either suppress ideas and dissent or to manufacture consent and compliance as well as to destroy the will and the intellect of the people. It has been used by both corporate and government forces, by the former to sell an illusion that generates consumerism and by the latter to domesticate or otherwise distract, it is used by institutionalized religion to spread a militant fundamentalist version of Christianity. The television explosion has been accompanied by directly proportional explosions of mental health problems, violence, debt and most importantly of all, ignorance.

The CIA has always been obsessed with mental manipulation and used LSD in crude, early experiments with mind control but eventually found it to be unreliable. Acid you see would always eventually wear off, leaving the subject wrecked, confused and at times rendered mentally ill as a result of being ‘dosed’. LSD is indeed a very potent drug, it effects each individual differently and consequently each individual would not necessarily have a consistent reaction each time that the drug was administered. I experimented with this drug on occasion in my younger days and can personally attest to the unpredictability of the effects that ranged from euphoric king of the world confidence and insight to manic laughter and enhanced sensual perceptive capabilities to a horrible paranoid depressiveness where every demon from your past would surface to rip a hole in your mind at the very time that your consciousness was in its most vulnerable state, often leaving me mentally wrecked for days at a time and suffering debilitating flashes of guilt and insecurity…and this was only at very small dosages, nothing like that of which that the government regularly dosed subjects with during experiments, most often unwittingly so that a test subject could be observed while the subjects unraveled and at times went insane.

There is a whole history of this that the public is not necessarily aware of, the project was known as MK ULTRA, one of those that was actually leaked or otherwise declassified among other acronyms and those interested can find accounts of this particular testing online at several locations and this one is a good jumping off point as any.

But I digress…

The acid is the ticket to either a great or a really bad trip at the time that it is effective and in the bloodstream but it does eventually work its way out of your system whereas the constant stimulation of the brain by television has no limit. There is no recovery from the effects of the endless assault of advertising and public relations experts, only reinforcement. Television has provided a medium for mass marketing for big business ever since its inception, these people have been imbedding ideas in our minds from the earliest days of the development of our cognitive abilities, if you think that this is paranoia just ponder the marketing strategy of a corporation like McDonalds which directs a large amount of it’s advertising towards children to take advantage of the ‘nag factor’ where the children pester their parents into visiting the local Mickey D’s for the family friendly atmosphere, enclosed play area and movie tie ins. When I was a kid there were the characters Mayor McCheese, Big Mac, The Hamburgler and the Grimmace among others that were ubiquitous on Saturday mornings, the only time for kids to get a full load of cartoons prior to cable television. McDonalds is but one example of how television is used to create an image in the minds of the youngest and most impressionable in society in order to create lifetime customers. This is a marketing model that was immediately seized on by the public relations industry and the government, both of which were fully aware of its power and potential to mold minds.

It is certain that elements within the government immediately realized the mind controlling potential of television just as big business realized that the new medium could be harnessed for advertising and commercial purposes so did the power brokers realize that it could be similarly utilized to manufacture consent, a term coined by Noam Chomsky, a great social critic who is sadly confined to the fringes of the alternative media in this country.

The coming of the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan (product as president) and emerging technologies that would be able to prolong the mental assault 24/7 the American public slowly began to accept televised illusions as real life, revisionist historical entertainment as fact, the glorification of wealth over all else as attainable and realistic and the myth of Rambo as a realistic personification of American foreign policy. I do not have enough time or space to look at this topic here so as to do it justice. The 1980’s saw the spread of corporate nationalist propaganda delivered over hundreds of channels, each appealing to a particular segmentation of a populace too mired in the pathetic quality of the daily grind of their boring and irrelevant lives. Now whenever they needed a fix, the ability to click the little button on the black remote and to be transported into a different world, a world of escape from the drudgery, a world where they could collectively bond with role models test marketed to appeal to their particular fancies, to be politically socialized by talking heads spewing radical ideologies, unencumbered by the Fairness Doctrine which was repealed under Reagan and which would forever change their way of thinking as well as to demonize what had been the real America prior to January 20 1981. They were given everything and anything in order to keep them tuned in so that the propagandists could keep the stimulation applied, the indoctrination process could continue uninterrupted, the herd could be brought to order and shepherded in directions that were desirable to their masters.

Television in itself is a relatively new invention, having only gained mass exposure in the past half century or so but if you want to approximate a time when the demarcation line between fantasy and reality in American life began to become defined it would definitely be in the early 1980’s with the explosion in the satellite and cable television industries. This is the time that it became possible to pump 100+ channels of violence, filth, political opinion, anyone can get rich quick scheme infomercials, lurid sexual innuendo and whatever other flotsam and jetsam of the human spirit that could be mined for profit into millions of homes throughout the country. The rise of both the radical religious right as well as the rise of the political reactionary right can both be traced to the rise in the availability of cable television and how those movements were able to use the technology to brainwash the masses.

Thus began the dumbing down:

Children became more violent and dysfunctional.

Freak shows like Morton Downey and Jerry Springer drew mass audiences while pandering to deviates who would see their sorry lives displayed for public amusement.

Today more people vote on cheese talent shows like American Idol than in most elections.

Television also creates insecurity and mental illness, viewers of too much television are often unable to make the differentiation between fantasy and reality, look at the rise in school shootings and generally deviant violent behavior. They live vicariously through the imagery designed to sell them caricatures of a lifestyle that they in turn believe that must be lived up to in order to be ‘normal’. The barrage of imagery as well as its calculated usage to influence the psyche by those whose craft is manipulation has a devastating effect on Americans. The inability to detach oneself from television worlds breeds violence, insecurity, greed and other such undesirable behavior. This is especially true for children who are very impressionable, there are highly paid marketing firms who specialize in trying to get the products and or ideas of those who pay them seared into the minds of kids from the earliest age possible in order to create lifetime customers. Is this evil? If not outright evil it is certainly devoid of any sort of decent ethical principle but then again isn’t this exactly the sort of deviant behavior that unchecked capitalism is intended to produce?

Will there be a time when television fantasy, physical reality and dreams become indistinguishable to some? Is that time already here? The psychological dependence on television to create identity and loyalty should be a national shame. Generations that have been born into the cable television era have become more violent, more superficial, more unquestioning and most importantly, far dumber than those who were their predecessors.

The rise to power of the evil regime of Hitler was borne on the wings of massive public rallies, fantastic gatherings steeped in the power of nationalism, symbolism, fire, resentment and demagogic ravings of destiny. The most famous of the state sponsored bacchanalia being the 1934 Nuremberg rally, meticulously choreographed and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will would become the benchmark for all German propaganda. The national madness of the German people can be seen in these rallies and films, the unraveling and descent of a sophisticated society into primal and pure evil was facilitated by them.

With television there is no need for mass rallies, the demagoguery and imagery can be delivered directly into your very own living room.

ooh daddy….give me a hit of that e-crack...ain’t never comin’ back!

THINK FOR YOURSELVES!