Friday, February 18, 2011

An Important Voice Speaks Out -OR- Whatever Will The Villagers Do To Ignore Truth

Out here on the fringe it is hard to put a cogent word in edgewise. For that you have to give credit where credit is due. Out here everything is reduced to non-sequitur. There is nothing in the newsfotainment stream to which desperately needed comment, discussion and debate can possibly relate. Pre-framed, pre-packaged, pre-scripted and served complete with first and last word provided by the rolodex of all knowledge worth knowing whose names are known and accepted as experts (because that's what the caption beneath their name says they are and they wouldn't be on TV if it weren't so). Folks like Pat Buchanhan, George Will, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Thom Friedman, Cokie Roberts, and the whole of Faux News' stable of liars. Rising and setting on how everything rises and sets only as it relates to maintaining the mythology of RWR.

The teeming millions, desperate for explanations, but too scared, harried and distracted to find and process independent information for themselves, ingest and
assimilate far inferior products as though it is nutrition for the mind. It may not make much sense to them, but the reasonable experts cited above seem to believe and understand it. Right?

So when a voice comes out of the wainscotting and speaks a different sermon, of and for a perspective with no mooring in the narrative continuity, it can sound queer and almost other-worldly; because it is. The world of which it speaks it the one we have lost.

Top of that list, for me, is Noam Chomsky
The ONLY place you'll see and hear him is on the PUBLIC Airwaves. The airwaves about to be defunded as unaffordable in these economic times.

You can see and hear the whole show at
Democracy Now

My favorite part:

NOAM CHOMSKY: This deification of Reagan is extremely interesting and a very—it’s scandalous, but it tells a lot about the country. I mean, when Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy. When he came into office, the United States was the world’s leading creditor. By the time he left, it was the world’s leading debtor. He was fiscally totally irresponsible—wild spending, no fiscal responsibility. Government actually grew during the Reagan years.

He was also a passionate opponent of the free market. I mean, the way he’s being presented is astonishing. He was the most protectionist president in post-war American history. He essentially virtually doubled protective barriers to try to preserve incompetent U.S. management, which was being driven out by superior Japanese production.

During his years, we had the first major fiscal crises. During the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the New Deal regulations were still in effect, and that prevented financial crises. The financialization of the economy began to take off in the ’70s, but with the deregulation, of course you start getting crises. Reagan left office with the biggest financial crisis since the Depression: the home savings and loan.

I won’t even talk about his international behavior. I mean, it was just abominable. I mean, if we gained our optimism by killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America and destroying any hope for democracy and freedom and supporting South Africa while it killed about a million-and-a-half people in neighboring countries, and on and on, if that’s the way we get back our optimism, we’re in bad trouble.

Well, what happened after Reagan left office is that there was the beginnings of an effort to carry out a kind of—this Reagan legacy, you know, to try to create from this really quite miserable creature some kind of deity. And amazingly, it succeeded. I mean, Kim Il-sung would have been impressed. The events that took place when Reagan died, you know, the Reagan legacy, this Obama business, you don’t get that in free societies. It would be ridiculed. What you get it is in totalitarian states. And I’m waiting to see what comes next. This morning, North Korea announced that on the birthday of the current god, a halo appeared over his birthplace. That will probably happen tomorrow over Reagan’s birthplace. But when we go in—I mean, this is connected with what we were talking about before. If you want to control a population, keep them passive, keep beating them over the head and let them look somewhere else, one way to do it is to give them a god to worship.


Give them a light and they'll follow it anywhere!

1 comment:

Cletis said...

"If you want to control a population, keep them passive, keep beating them over the head and let them look somewhere else, one way to do it is to give them a god to worship." Marx had it right with the religion=opium for the proletariat crack. The hell of it is, those at the top have never worshipped a damn thing but self-interest. They throw a few folks into the volcano and meet at the club later for a brandy or two. My dad helped found the UMWA in Harlan County, Kentucky and he detested Reagan. Runs in the family. I appreciate your blog.