Deceit

Greetings good citizen,

The Asian markets closed down, the European markets managed to trade sideways for most of Friday’s session in positive territory, causing US markets to open in positive territory, where they promptly took a nosedive. I logged out and logged back in again (to the business section of the NY Times) and the Dow dropped 10 points, and it was only up 20…

Weird how the market’s performance segues into today’s offering about how the public is regularly ‘duped’

While I had hopes for some kind of breakthrough, it turns out the story us well known to us all:

But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and resignations. Taken together— and given that a good percentage of the pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic storylines—they mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs. [snip]

Operatives words here good citizen are ‘should have’…and it leaves open the even more disturbing question of why (almost) nobody got the proverbial axe for being so fantastically wrong!

Why did the ‘older crew’, the guys who had been around the block a few times, fuck up so royally?

Let’s see…you don’t suppose they got ‘the word’ laid on them, do ya?

You don’t suppose management came down and told ‘em, point blank, “if you want to keep getting your paycheck, here’s the ‘angle’ we’re looking for!”

How much you wanna bet before the editors had that little chat with the reporters, the owners had a very similar chat with the editors…and some of ‘em even went as far as, er, ‘implying’ that all of the other news outlets would be toeing the same line.

For nearly a generation now it has been common knowledge that NOTHING the Corporate owned media comes out with can be trusted!

You know it, I know it and they KNOW we KNOW.

It must send them into fits of hysteria when they see the ‘not so attentive’ panicking over something they read or heard in the media.

But at the end of the day it’s all a big joke so why not have some fun while they’re at it?

Yup, the same old story:

The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.

What I didn’t understand was that these weren’t cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

How tragic is it good citizen that this fellow isn’t in on the joke?

Ironically, there are a lot of people who A.) only suspect something is amiss or B.) have no frickin’ clue and think the press HAS TO tell the truth!

So when you see the Headline “President considering sanctions on Iran.” YOU KNOW it means Israel is agitating to attack Iran and we, as usual, are providing ‘cover’…

Maybe it has become an accepted part of modern culture, we now expect to have to ‘decipher’ the headlines to try and figure out if anything worth knowing is going on.

You know the default mode is silence laced with intermittent spurts of cheerleading/chest-thumping. The headlines aren’t ‘news’ in themselves but ‘clues’ usually to what they DON’T want you to notice!

But there’s a more disturbing dynamic at work here…

One that I have pointed to repeatedly in the past.

I know it drives some of you nuts when I dance around like this so I’m just going to come out with it.

What are YOU gonna do about it?

And the answer is…NOTHING!

If the people we elected to do something about it, DON’T…YOU’RE SCREWED!

The government has come right out and TOLD us that THEY can name ANY ONE OF US an ‘Enemy combatant’ and have us EXECUTED…

AND THERE AIN’T A FUCKING THING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!

Do any of you reading this think, for a single instant, that the government officials who passed this legislation GIVE A FLYING FUCK what the rest of us think of them?

So, when they actually start executing ‘enemies of the state’, what, precisely, do YOU intend to do about it?

(Cue sound of chirping crickets)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner