"Georgia" first hit of the new fall season
Frank Paynter asks: "Is it scatter-brained to think that the nation states are mere stage dressing for a broader and more fundamental power struggle amongst an oligarchic elite that thinks they own the planet? "
Nope. We're just pawns in the game.
Power corrupts, but it also buys great propaganda. Our job is to watch, bicker, and bitch. I'm a bigger patriot than you! You're the traitor! Your party sucks! It's the immigrants fault! etc.
Consider the scuffle in Georgia -- "It’s not about Georgia. It’s not about Ossetia. It’s not about Russia. It’s about natural gas from Kazakhstan and the oligarchs who will profit from its extraction and distribution," Frank rightly points out. But for the public, it is solely about "Russian aggression!" "thuggery!" "disproportionate response" (Lebanon must love that one). It's a cheap, thoroughly dishonest morality play, more programming fodder for the media and politicians. I flicked the channels yesterday and saw John McCain waxing eloquent about the old Christian churches and the beautiful countryside of Georgia. We were supposed to be shaking our head about that evil Russia invading those good, upstanding Ameri...er, Georgians.
Or, as Joe Bageant says:
Frank Paynter asks: "Is it scatter-brained to think that the nation states are mere stage dressing for a broader and more fundamental power struggle amongst an oligarchic elite that thinks they own the planet? "
Nope. We're just pawns in the game.
Power corrupts, but it also buys great propaganda. Our job is to watch, bicker, and bitch. I'm a bigger patriot than you! You're the traitor! Your party sucks! It's the immigrants fault! etc.
Consider the scuffle in Georgia -- "It’s not about Georgia. It’s not about Ossetia. It’s not about Russia. It’s about natural gas from Kazakhstan and the oligarchs who will profit from its extraction and distribution," Frank rightly points out. But for the public, it is solely about "Russian aggression!" "thuggery!" "disproportionate response" (Lebanon must love that one). It's a cheap, thoroughly dishonest morality play, more programming fodder for the media and politicians. I flicked the channels yesterday and saw John McCain waxing eloquent about the old Christian churches and the beautiful countryside of Georgia. We were supposed to be shaking our head about that evil Russia invading those good, upstanding Ameri...er, Georgians.
Or, as Joe Bageant says:
...having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today's system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things -- the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality.
