Will you turn the parlour off?" he asked. "That's my family." "Will you turn it off for a sick man?" "I'll turn it down." She went out of the room and did nothing to the parlour and came back. "Is that better?
Ray Bradbury: Ferenheit 451
It is becoming clear that the Trump strategy of having his fat, lying, painted face on TV everyday is helping him sucker a dangerous percentage of the American People. People who can be, as the current phrase puts it, "gaslighted" into believing that what they saw Trump say and what they heard he did yesterday or last week or last month didn't happen. Or to allow those who are as prone to depraved unreality as he is pretend that it doesn't really matter. That is certainly a kind of thinking that a lifetime of watching the unreality of TV will produce in those vulnerable to it as certainly as a lifetime of smoking or drinking alcohol will produce the effects in those predisposed to developing emphysema or cancer or liver disease or the not entirely different dementia caused by alcohol use.
And the TV producers, directors, "news" directors are helping in that effort even in the face of Trump suckering people in the very midst of the pandemic that, if Republican-fascist, Trumpian, oligarchic desires were in effect, could be expected to kill millions instead of the hundreds of thousands that are expected under the least horrible scenarios IF SEVERE MEASURES TO LIMIT THE SPREAD OF THE DISEASE ARE UNDERTAKEN.
That the world-wide economy is going to take a severe hit under any circumstances has been clear for a while, now. Than the Trumpian prescription that he is now, sometimes, to an extent and probably only on some days changing, lifting stay-at-home orders would produce even worse economic consequences as those millions crash the private-for-profit medical system in the United States and force further shut downs of travel and work and gatherings only figures into the idea men behind Republican-fascism and the propaganda machines of oligarchy in so far as they can game the current conditions to gull the suckers. They will be "gaslighting" the American People, trained by TV to be suckers - all of those commercials and all of the corporate propaganda allowed by the unregulated mass media should have rationally been expected to produce no other effect - that suckering of the American People will continue.
Other than getting a decisive majority of Americans to give up the slogans and phony substitute morality that the ACLU and, yes, the media have suckered them into valuing more than the truth that is needed to sustain egalitarian democracy, I don't know what can be done to change this. The media has proven over the past forty years that they are fully in with Republican-fascism, not the economic disasters that have come from giving the crooks and industrialists and hucksters and liars free reign to sucker the public. Previous disasters have not changed that. Not the disasters such as the illegal invasion of Iraq, sold on lies told on TV and on the radio, it has been very good for both the media and for its owners.
It has been good for the scribbling industry and the entertainment media that is the primary engine for turning the American People into the kind of country that might produce a Trump once and, as many are fearing, returning him to have another four years to loot and crash the country and the world. Even Trump's fiercest critics in the commercial media would be appalled at someone like me suggesting that their "more speech" has proven to be not only ineffective but a help to the corrupting and destruction of the United States. Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Mother Jones, the entire lefty media are as invested in those slogans and ersatz replacements that include the protection and, so, privilegiing of lies of the very kind they are largely powerless to overturn.
Democracy can only exist within limited parameters in which those with wealth and power and control of the media are permitted to act. Government of, by and for The People is inevitably in opposition to the interests of the rich and powerful. You can choose one or the other, they can be given absolute freedom as the disastrous literal reading of the First Amendment does OR YOU CAN HAVE EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, YOU CANNOT HAVE BOTH. That is the meaning of the last half-century of America's experiment with free-speech, free-press absolutism in which the media has been freed of all restrictions, inclusing that most dangerous one, to spread misinformation, the huge permission granted by the Warren Court to the New York Times in 1964 over what should have been a mere order for them to correct the minor mistakes in an add and to pay the court costs of the scumball they printed those bits of misinformation about. From that and from the lofty and obviously wrong declarations of how the complete freedom of the media to fearlessly publish whatever they wanted would produce complete freedom has come the corrupted American Public who can be gulled into forgetting or pretending to forget what they saw and heard Donald Trump say yesterday or last week or last month. The habits of watching a lot of TV have that effect too, they prevent people from the habit of remembering things accurately, everything is present stream of consciousness without any of the self-discipline that comes from paying attention to real life instead of the tube.
The present pandemic shows what happens when a large percentage of the public have been so damaged in mind and soul, so corrupted that even their own safety doesn't make much of an impression on them as opposed to the hucker wizard on the screen in front of them and his lying babble. Why should anyone be surprised? The "journalists" on TV are as big a bunch of suckers, the ones who praised his "change of tone" as they praised Bush II's "change of tone" as he became the previous worst president in modern times. They're either as big a bunch of chumps as their audiences are or they're in on the con job. I would include those who uphold the ACLU line on "free speech, free press" in, perhaps, sincere opposition as I do the CNN-ABC-CBS-NPR con artists in that.
No comments:
Post a Comment