April 17, 2003
The War on Sanity
AOL is a fairly good system for getting online when you are traveling, so my family keeps it, though I loathe the company and its hideous corporate mentality, which blasts out at me from my screen every morning. I suppose it serves as a way of keeping in touch with what the corporate monsters are thinking -- and what they want to massage the masses into thinking.At any given time AOL's opening page shows three headlines, one political and a couple of others, usually relatively trite subjects, considering the gravity of much of what is going on now. But it's not the subjects that are so nauseatingly offensive, it's the underlying mentality that pervades it all. There is a cheerleading function of it. It's directing: Let's all be stupid together! Let's conform willingly to the agenda of our great leaders!
Last night and this morning it was blasting a message about those furshlugginer, ungrateful Iraqis. Last night it was "Liberated -- and mad at us", showing some irate Iraqis demonstrating against the US. This morning it's altered a bit to say, "Iraqis are free to slam us now."
The inherent Big Lie is that "operation Iraqi Freedom" really "liberated" the people whose country it destroyed, whose families it killed or maimed. And a more fundamental Big Lie in all of this kind of reporting is the first person plural pronoun: "us". As if "we" are all in this together. As if the Bush administration/corporate dictatorship really represents "us", the American population. The fact is clearly that it represents a single digit percentage of the population. Primarily it represents a tiny elite that owns and controls most of the resources of the country, and increasingly of the world.
So this remains the biggest challenge, maintaining the sanctity of your own mind in the midst of a massive assault by the most powerful mind control techniques known to humanity.
I recently visited Universal Studios theme park in Florida. I rode on some of the "rides", like the Spiderman ride where they give you 3D glasses and put you in a car that moves around on a track with projected images around you. The combination of motion and 3D visual images simulates the experience of being hurtled through city space like a meteor, when you are really just being jerked around a few feet with projected images in front of your face. It's a very sophisticated technology and has a tremendous power to create the experience of "realities" that are entirely simulated.
Of course it's a huge money-making machine that runs masses of people through and wrings huge profits out of them, but it also has a feeling of being a huge laboratory where the most sophisticated reality-altering techniques are tested on people like white rats. If such powerful reality simulating techniques are available for an entertainment operation, what kind of sophistication must be available for massaging the minds of a whole population to turn the massive energy inherent in that population into raw material for the corporate state? With so many billions of dollars at stake, why wouldn't the most highly developed techniques be brought into service of that objective? That is what we are seeing with the mass media, an enormous operation for creating a simulated reality, which serves the purposes of the elite.
Whenever you receive a message from the corporate state, that is how it must be read. It isn't real. It's a device to manipulate you. For Americans, the main task is to extract one's mind from the virtual reality in which we are all enmired.
Here are some random links to help serve as a daily antidote to the corporate brainwashing.
Try these links again. They are repaired now.
Some are making a plausible case that Baghdad did not fall -- it was handed over through a backroom deal cut with the Iraq regime, who were after all installed and maintained by the US in the first place. See informationclearinghouse.info, Hinduonnet.com, and Al Jazeera. Here is some good information on the Neocon plan for taking over the world, spelled out in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and the Project for a New American Century, courtesy of the excellent Information Clearing House. And here is the home page and breaking news from Information Clearing House. From the days of JFK through 1991, documents indicate Saddam worked for the CIA. See Village Voice. Problems for the Democrats: war and 2004. See Washington Post. Tim Robbins gave a great speech at the Press Club. See the text at Commondreams. Clinton blasts Bush foreign policy. See Yahoo. Michael Moore says don't despair. Of course he's a millionaire, so what's he got to despair about? But his intelligence, his courage and his sense of humor are keys to the way out of this mess. Ultimately, it's all in the mind. Really. See Seattle Pi. Venezuela's Chavez government says it has proof the US government was behind the attempted coup a year ago. See CBC. Bush is most dangerous president ever. See The American Prospect.