Having trouble understanding the ins and outs of DC politics?
Can’t figure out why our august Senators, powerful executive branch players, hard-working Representatives and the pundits who cover them cannot seem to get anything right?
Did you have high hopes for the Obama administration, only to see them dashed to pieces on the rocks of bureaucratic incompetence and infighting?
I have been feeling your pain, Bunky. It’s so confusing !!!
Well…cheer up. I experienced a “Eureka!!!” moment while surfing the 1000-tentacled tube monster in search of something…anything…even remotely interesting last night, and now I understand it all.
Read on for more.
Are you familiar with the CBS non-reality show Big Brother? it is apparently an ongoing series where they assemble a cast of 20-something state-college types in a house and film them 24/7 as they endlessly scheme and flatulize over who will and who won’t be kicked out of the house. I suppose that the last asshole standing is the winner, but I will never find out because…well, because I don’t really give a shit. These are the same middle-class fools from whom I ran as fast as my little legs would carry me after I left high school, and their stories are simply so pre-written…marriage, eventual corpulence, unsatisfactory sex and equally unsatisfactory progeny, divorces, crushing debt, continuous worry and its inevitable partner unhappiness, pharmacological carousels of every sort imaginable and of course those perennial favorites death and taxes…that it is not worth any time whatsoever to watch them wriggle under the microscope of the hypnomedia for the delectation of similar sleeple far and wide across this great land of ours, Omertica. (Blessed be its real name.)
Now no doubt the CBS version of the series is edited down to catch all of the juicy parts…as juicy as the Granny No-No censors will allow to pass through their sex sieves of course, because we do not want to alienate any potential buyers of Omertican shitgoods and pisservices, now do we? But the longer daily Showtime cable version is less edited towards interesting moments and apparently more edited with an eye to suggestive sexual situations and an ongoing sluggish drone of complaint among various groups of contestants.
“He said this to Contestant X.”
“No!!!”
“Yes. And he’s a two-faced poopy head because he said this to Contestant Y!!!”
“Really? No way!!!”
“Yes. And he’s hustling Contestant Z in order to fulfill his scheme of getting you and Contestant Q kicked off the show this very week.”
“Why I oughta…”
And on and on for the better part of three hours. Or so I guess. I tuned in a couple of times over a few hours and the same shit was happening every time. Same shit, different group, similar room. ZZZZZzzzzzzz…
Now in itself this is not very surprising. Although I have never managed to watch any non-reality show for more than about 6 minutes…usually for a much shorter time, like say 12 seconds…given the difference in visuals among their various settings the actual content of the programs is almost identical. Politics reduced to an easily manageable size. Who will most successfully assemble an ad hoc compromise group in order to dominate in the short term, and next week another hustle will present itself as a survival necessity. But the other shows in their shorter versions….remember, this one is three hours long…focus mostly on more visceral scenes like women in ratty makeshift thongs trying to pound open a coconut with a rock or Las Vegas bimbo-types being romanced by bachelors who all look like the male half of the singing act The Carpenters at 28. (What was his name again? Richard? Mookie? Patience? I forget. Didn’t he become kinda corpulent eventually as well? So it goes, I guess.)
Anyway, the Big Brother: After Dark version really brought it all home to me.
These State College/Junior College/Mediocre College types that populate the show?
They are the same kinds of people who populate the offices and corridors of our government, up and down the line from Washingtoon DeeCeeLand through Albany NY, Montgomery AL and right on down to the Podunk Board of Aldermen and the School Board of Levittown PA.
Bet on it.
The salt of the earth.
Low sodium version, of course.
Instead of being wrapped in blankets and occasionally flashing their pubes for the camera…
They are wrapped in suits and bare their pubes in secret, shameful ways, all hidden from the prying eyes of their constituents for fear of being kicked out of their own “house”. The Catbird Seat House.
Saaaay!!! Isn’t that John Carpenter? I mean…Mookie? Richard? Oh…,you know who I mean, right? That guy?
Or…is it John Ritter? (Sorry…I get so confused by these stingless little WASPS. They all look alike, dontcha know…)
Anyway…my point here is…how can you continue to take any of them seriously?
Seriously, folks. Up and down the line, from Big Brother: The TV Series to Big Brother: The Permanent Government.
HOW CAN YOU CONTINUE TO WATCH THESE SHOWS!!!???
It is beyond my understanding, that’s for sure.
The only real solution(s)?
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
VAYA!!!
But NOOOOOoooo…
Almost all of you will be happily lapping up Big Brother: The PermaGov Years in its daily Olbermann/Maddow/PBS/CBS/NBC/ABC/NY Times/Washington Post/Newsweek iterations as soon as you can get to the nearest purveyor of reality filth.
May as well watch Big Brother: After Dark for all the good it’s going to do you.
At least the contestants are better looking.
Mostly.
Station WTFU signing off.
And remember…
WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!
It’s later than you think.
Bet on it.
AG
Or better yet…
Your choice…
AG
Real men watch The Apprentice.
Isn’t that the one where a big robot in a bad wig and a permanent scowl bullies a bunch of ass-kissers who are themselves twitterheads of the least human variety?
Sorry…I must’ve missed it.
AG
A pleasure to see you back AG!
A good point really: Although the permagov is more diabolical than we imagine, it is scarcely more competent than the fools we see in public life or on TV.
A problem in any propaganda system is that the lies it promulgates gradualy travel backward to infect the operators who are supposed to know what they are doing. As the quality of thought in the public sphere declines, the controllers become stupified as well. This would not matter if the sheeple were their only opponents, but there are other levels of reality more or less waiting to surprise them–unpleasantly.
A good personal survival strategy is to be well out of view when that happens.
Every declining (or collapsing) civilization enters this stage that we are in now. What we are seeing are all symptoms. Handwriting on the wall, so to speak. Plenty of handwriting!
I have given up on the media, and am gradually giving up on the web. Signal to noise ratio keeps dropping, everywhere! This is as it must be, and again, is another sign. The choice is hardening–reality or fantasy.
I know what most people will choose.
Try BBC. I notice they broadcast the news without a lot of noise. Its refreshing to hear whats going on without an opinion.
You “notice they broadcast the news without a lot of noise?”
Their noise is just less familiar to you. It’s there. In spades. It’s just presented a little more elegantly. just below the fine words lies the iron fist of modern, corporate-driven kleptocracy. Bet on it.
The mindset in the U.K…I just returned from a trip there last month…makes American paranoia look tame in comparison. Remember, the U.K is by far the most surveiilled country on earth. Cameras everywhere, data mining on a massive scale.
You want to know more about where they’re at than what is presented on the BBC news shows? Watch the slick spy-cop drama MI-5. Big Brother with a heart. A glossy, modern London surveilled from every corner, all info leading into an office full of highly trained male and female models who heroically keep the bad guys from blowing our magnificent Western Civilization to perdition on a weekly basis.
I got yer BBC.
Right here!!!
Later…
AG
Perfect.
Regarding the web I recently went through that on another level, one that is much less important on a line-level survival basis. I recently made a real physical breakthrough in the way that I teach and play my instrument, and I posted it on a number of forums that deal with such things. It is a work in progress, but it flat-out works. Now…I am at a level in this profession that might be thought of as akin to that of an independent researcher in experimental physics or an astronomer or mathematician who had proven to be very good at his study for well over 20 years, and I have posted similar ideas over those years that have proved out for literally thousands of players with only moderate resistance to “the new.”
This time?
FUGGEDABOUDUT!!!
I was totally unprepared for the levels of paranoia, anger, distrust and fear that spun out of two of the nine forums to which I posted. It was like Daily Kos at its worst, somewhere around the Pie Fight/July 4th Massacre time. The piling on!!! Unbelievable.
This is a sign of the times. When “the truth” becomes so twisted on a daily level, when no one with an ounce of awareness can any longer trust anything> that they are told in the media 24/7, then we have dropped down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole into some fresh hell where even the most prosaic necessities of life come alive and bite you when you least expect them to do so.
Who can you trust when you cannnot trust anybody?
In a kleptocracy the honest man is the criminal, and down and around we go, right into the wormhole and headed for oblivion.
You also say:
I wish that I knew where one could reliably go on this planet to be “well out of view when that happens.” Well out of range, to be accurate. Retiring to the depths of the Amazon rain forests or a remote island in the Pacific to wait out the onrushing collapse is simply not a viable option for me, and states that are more well balanced and stand in opposition to the system that we are watching as it disintegrates under our very noses are going to be those that stand the greatest chance of attack as the shit hits the fan here.
Cuba?
Lord help the Cubans if Obama fails to be re-elected and is replaced on the ever-widening pendulum swing of politics by a reactionary on the order of Sarah Palin. Canada? Nope. Canada will go as does the US, only more politely. The more socialist, more civilized countries of Europe? Scandinavia, Holland, France, etc.? The Western/Islamic War that is only growing with every passing day will eventually set fire to their asses as well.
We can only hope for a miracle.
And hope does spring eternal. Unless the universe is through with us, evolution will continue here on earth. That belief is all that keeps me upright and still fighting now. Believe it. Otherwise I would just kick back on some inexpensive beach in Belize or elsewhere in the Caribbean, calmly watch the fire next time from as far away from the heat as it is possible to place myself and prepare for the inevitable.
So it goes.
Continue to resist on a personal level.
That is all that we can really do.
Peace, gaianne.
It’s what’s for dinner.
Be well…
AG
I’ll be at Isla Margarita, come up and see me sometime.
Why Isla Margarita?
It’s my new fantasy escape – a warm and laid-back Caribbean life.
I used to dream of Australia, but things have changed.
I am sorry to hear this, but it is the kind of thing I mean. It is not just information becoming dirty, but decline in discourse itself.
Anger may be the key emotion here–it means that listening has stopped.
This is a hard question: There are several strategies, and they are all uncertain. You personal choice should be shaped by where you want to be–where your heart is, at least as much as tactical considerations.
The US is sure to lash out–but where? Any place in the world may be a target, yet not all places will be targetted.
The miracle will be if everyone keeps a low enough profile that the bombs never drop. It could happen.