THE DISINFORMATION CLOWN BUS

Every day I tell self to stop paying attention to politicians, any kind of attention, even disgust. I have good books to read, good movies to watch, magazines, art projects, friends, and much, much more. I see today Lindsay Graham said something else so stupid he made headlines again. Why do I even know his name? Scrolling down facebook, I see Ted Cruz said something marvellously ridiculous again, I stop and look to see what it could be this time. Every pause I remind self I am giving this clown car occupant attention, better to give my attention to skateboard fail videos. I stop scrolling when I see Mitch McConnell, to read or see video of his new stupid for the day. These talking marionettes are one hundred percent predictable to say something with no connection to anything but their own stupid. Rand Paul is receiving a string of attention the last weeks for saying something that gives the appearance on the surface of being not quite so stupid as usual; therefore, noteworthy. A three-year-old can say, E equals emcee squared, but it doesn't mean the kid gets it. The depth of stupid is so bad I wonder if it could be a Heritage Foundation strategy to keep these names and faces on the evening news by saying something outrageously stupid. Propagandists and television producers know content is nothing, name recognition everything. Even if the whole clown bus is scripted, which it is, it takes a vacant, nobody-home robot to spew such ignorance and act proud of it

Another gift that goes on giving from the Cheney-Bush junta is Karl Rove, master propagandist, somebody who belongs in a cell next to Charles Manson. I pay attention to him as well as the others and question self, why? Like the comedy of stupid, Karl Rove wins the award for the malignancy of stupid. He has a brilliant mind, fast and retentive, and the ethics of the corporations that pay and privilege him. Ethics is something we never see in a politician, if there ever was such a thing as an ethical politican who did not walk away from the profession. We see plenty of the pretense of ethics in politicians as in preachers, the same smug attitude, I am  important and you are not. Ethics is not even a consideration in America after two-thirds of a century of television propaganda central, and corporate control. Every day, seeing headlines, faces and obvious bullshit, I think of Reagan's CIA appointee, Wm Casey, saying, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." False News is the most watched news on tv. I don't know if anybody else sees this, but it says to me, we citizens have been the mass target of a disinformation program by the CIA since before 1981, when it was spoken publicly by a CIA director, and we go on like it's a secret we're expected to deny. 

People like Rachel Maddow, for one, bore me with their pretend naivete about the disinformation coming through the republican think-tanks, the first half of the country to commit to the false. We get disinformation through corporate television news. Like all liars, they tell us what they want us to believe. It works for them. It works so well for them, they deleted democracy by popular will, disinformation through tv. The Patriot Act, conceived, planned, written, edited over several years, was printed, bound and boxed awaiting delivery on time when 9/11 happened, without anybody seeing it coming. Nobody asked where the Patriot Act came from, they already knew. Legislators accepted that it deleted the Constitution, because the Koch Bros bought them into their dream Country Clubs. The republican clown bus audition for Koch sponsorship gives evidence the Kochs do not favor intelligence or ethics. They take us for stupid, buy us stupid representatives, treat us like we're stupid, and we affirm them by supporting them, even by paying attention to them. I'm getting with self quite a lot over paying attention to them, even if only to assess the landscape of a world I live in and have no more say in than in the governance of Monaco.

I pay attention, seeing current events a serial documentary, The Fall of the American Empire. When I read the kindle next lifetime, I'll wonder why it feels so familiar like I was there while knowing I was not. Next lifetime, I will see the crash on the news from another country and join in the international jubilation. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. It will be like a football (soccer) championship match, USA vs All The Rest Of The World, and All The Rest Of The World wins, riotous celebration. Like Abe Lincoln said, America will only be defeated from within. I've been watching the process all my adult life, since the corporate coup of 1963. Going by where I see this process going, I'd suggest to the black brothers and sisters expatriate as fast as you can go, like Jews leaving Europe in the 1930s. The only thing about black lives that matters in American police state is target. Don't go to Africa. US troops are moving into Africa, rare minerals, poverty, statistically defenseless, the new place for the Pentagon's ongoing war to keep war production corporate profits in the billions per. I don't want to expatriate. Whatever the choice of where to go, I'd be "the American." Here, at home, I'm just a Joe, responsible for nothing political, just my own behavior. 

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THE VIEW IN A DARK TIME

Just off the telephone with my friend Kathryn. We always have lively conversation. She's taking care of her mother with dementia. I saw Kathryn was on facebook, telling me mama was asleep and Kathryn was free. Time to call. We tend to talk about funny occurrences or news that's hilarious. Of course, hilarious news is tragic news we laugh at because we have no say in anything beyond our own immediate decisions. We pay attention to the news like watching the Howdy Doody Show with Mr Bluster, Dilly-Dally, Princes Summer Fall Winter Spring, Clarabel the clown. For Mr Bluster we have Mitch McConnell, for Dilly-Dally Ted Cruz, for Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring Michelle Bachmann, and W Bush continues as Clarabel the clown. In the past I'd get excited about having such as we have for "representatives" and leaders who neither represent nor lead. A lifetime of seeing moronic people in government satisfies my questioning of how legislation in DC and state capitals got the way it has become. I used to wonder where a nation that only concerned itself with money could go, up or down or stay the same. Right and wrong are of no significance now. Truth and honesty are laughed at as naïve. Respect isn't even a word anymore. Now people ask why trust is important. I saw an article last week of W Bush painting. He is taking lessons with somebody who is teaching him well. He has begun including in pictures of himself the dead Iraqi child who is with him day and night wherever he goes. He has a specter living with him, attached to his soul. He talks about it like it's the latest clever thing. I don't like to think about him, don't like his image in my head. I've been an anti-fascist since childhood, so I'm automatically not disposed toward him. It actually warmed my heart to see he had drawn the ghost of a dead Iraqi child to himself. After all the agony and death he has directly caused to so many million people at home and abroad, I like seeing karmic justice has not failed him.

 

 

The justice of the law has failed us in Dubya's case. But karmic justice is with him. Sometimes it feels good to see karmic justice take place, like in the case of Roy Cohn, who destroyed so many lives with Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. All three of them self-destructed. Cohn came down with AIDS and died in infamy. McCarthy drank himself to death. Nixon self-destructed and went out in mortal shame. Johnson went out broken. Bush 1 set the stage to see Bush 2 destroy the family name. I used to wonder about karma concerning the people who make decisions to turn the military-industrial-complex to the task of giving the American economy a boost. A war that is not a war, torture that is not torture, to annihilate a small defenseless nation of poor people for the benefit of American corporations, stockholders and billionaires. And jobs. Shit jobs that undermine your humanity and don't pay near enough for it, but jobs. I've lived long enough to have witnessed by keeping up with current events as history much that even my most jaundiced mind could not have anticipated. Attitude today seems like police state is a surprise. Even Rachel Maddow acts like it's a surprise. It has been coming on at least since the Fifties. Vietnam was never a surprise. Iraq was no surprise. They are true to pattern. The big one for me has  been the popular repeal of Democracy followed by popular police state, accomplished by propaganda. My friend John who is 101 said the most significant change he saw in his lifetime was the emergence of the salad. It doesn't seem like much, but give it a five second thought and it becomes an enormous change. It wasn't very long ago Americans didn't drink wine except Mad Dog 20/20, Wild Irish Rose and Thunderbird. Suddenly Americans are drinking so much wine the vineyards of the world are stressed, can't make it fast enough. Both grocery stores in Sparta have big wine sections. The coffee shop sells wine. It wasn't very many years ago coffee was Maxwell House, Folger or JFG. You can even find Sumatran coffee at the grocery store in Sparta now. People used to go to bars to drink beer. Now we go to bars to drink coffee.

 

 

 I like to back away from the social scene and see it from afar for what we call the big picture. I like both the big picture and the little picture, both the forest and the trees. Since paying attention to the last half a century as it was happening, seeing it as history, the big picture, I have a fair understanding of patterns in American government behavior, such that new events fall into place. Joe Biden made me laugh when he went to Ukraine to tell Putin, Don't do as I do, do as I say. That is so an American attitude and so blatantly naïve to think it would have meaning outside USA, I couldn't help but laugh. He's a politician, he says what his handlers tell him to say, following script. The news has become slap-stick comedy. It is fitting Comedy Central has the most insightful news programs on tv or radio. It's refreshing to see Limbaugh on the wane, and even more refreshing to see a pope who talks about love, compassion, empathy, caring. Did that ever come as a voice in the wilderness. Yes, we are in a dark time. Democracy in America did not survive it. There is the principle that it is darkest before dawn that gives me confidence this cycle is about to turn to the light. But I'm not going to hold my breath. I won't see it in this lifetime. Seeing the cycle of what we're going through collectively as Americans and as world, it tells me the democracy we had, which was not really democracy, had to go. It was an oligarchy before the latest university study made headlines saying it is. Perhaps in this time of traditions falling away, American oligarchic democracy needed to change. To make way for the new. After a cycle of assault on what we had of democracy by the Reagan Junta, maybe the next cycle will erect  a new building on the site of the old one that was torn down. This democracy didn't work, so tear it down and start a new one. When I look at it from afar, I see the patterns and the cycles. It ceases to be aggravating. In close, seeing only the short term, it turns frightening in a hurry. 

 

 

This guy, Cliven Bundy, he's just an American white man. He's not extreme racist or any of what he's being accused of in prosecutorial terms only. He's a white man. He's no surprise. He's just ego-centric enough to say publicly what white men tend to say privately. He's been listening to Rush Limbaugh for so many years, he's just spewing what he was taught in the name of God and country. Hilarious, him carrying a big American flag riding a horse and saying he does not recognize the United States Government. White man. It's perfectly logical to him. He's not being outrageous. White man is in crisis at the moment when Others and Blacks are tipping the scale, inching toward 51%. I look at this Limbaugh hate phenomenon from the inside, up close, and it makes my blood pressure go up, makes me want to write outrageous sentences like I think they would matter. Then I look at someone I know who thinks outrage matters, and laugh at myself. I pull back to my home, to the world of people I live among, my neighbors, people I know, people I care about, Caterpillar napping in the other room, the donkeys in their meadow, my relationship with God, the people and pets I have loved who are gone. I return to Now, in the chair I'm sitting on like a drummer pounding the keyboard. This is where I belong. This is where I am. People in the news like Bundy I have come to see as cartoons of themselves. Cartoons are funny. I laugh when I think about them or talk about them. People I know who are sensible never show on the news. It seems like the sensible people have faded away. But I maintain the sensible people are alive and well. By sensible, I mean something like they don't let their opinions rule their lives. Opinions do rule our lives to some degree, but a sensible person does not take a rifle to a synagogue parking lot and start shooting people because he doesn't like Jews. I believe I could guess with a fair degree of accuracy that he's never known a Jew. He evidently thinks drag queens are special, having been arrested for having sex with one in the back seat of his car. This is what I mean by not sensible. Nobody in my world is that kind of crazy. We're crazy because we have a sense of humor and like to laugh and cut up. I prefer the world of fun crazy.

 

 

 

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