http://edwardcurtin.com/showtime-in-ame ... si-review/
“The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.”
– Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
– Mark Twain
If believability is your gauge for discerning truth, you are living in a fantasy world. But that is the reality of life in the United States today. This is the land of make-believe in which actors and audiences are engaged in a vast folie à deux full of sound and fury signifying a nothingness that passes for intelligence. Assertions made convincingly enough are the new facts for a population hypnotized by a stage-managed reality show.
The recently closed Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Show that mercifully had a short run at the National Comedic Congressional Theater is the latest case in point. The believability of the actors was said to be the key issue. In other words, who seemed to be telling the truth. Demeanor was determinative. Facial expressions evidence. The mass media, those paragons of truth-telling, entertained their audiences for a few weeks by marching out their puerile pundits to tell audiences who of the two primary actors was more believable, while the politicians, not willing to allow their media accomplices to outdo them in truthfulness, donned their masks and performed their usual public service of moral outrage and did the same in their unbiased ways.
There was no child to yell and tell the world that all the king’s sycophants, like the king, were naked – naked liars whose jobs depended on disinformation and deceptions meant to amuse an entertainment-besotted and bored public hungry for a bit of truth in a society drowning in agitprop and propaganda. A public watching the wrong show.
The words the real Frank Serpico, the honest and brave cop, not the actor, Al Pacino, who played him in the movie Serpico, come to my mind. He told me that when he was lying in a pool of his own blood on the night of February 3, 1971, having been shot in the face in a set-up carried out by fellow cops, he heard a voice that said, “It’s all a lie.”
“It’s all a lie.”
Those words sum up the spectacle that is American society today. And while lies are nothing new – didn’t Aletheia, the Greek goddess of truth, flee into the wilderness just last week and say to a wandering searcher, “Among the people of old, lies were found among only a few, but now they have spread throughout all of human society”? – we are living in a time of unprecedented technological media mind manipulation difficult to penetrate. Harold Pinter called it “a tapestry of lies” in which facts don’t matter. What happened never happened; what never happened happened. It’s all about believability in the national media’s hypnotic show, whose purpose Russell Baker described 25 years ago as being to “provide a manageably small cast for a national sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just entertaining us.”
…
I would like to leave you laughing with a quote that has been disturbing me since I first read it after writing it:
Until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us, we won’t grasp the problem. Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States. We live in a society built of lies; lying and dishonesty are the norm. They are built into the fabric of all our institutions, into our psyches. In America, there’s no business but show business, and we are sham actors, amusing ourselves to death while we spread death and destruction in our war theaters all around the world. Theaters in which the tragic plays we direct hold no interest for us. We prefer our Idiots’ Delight.
“It’s All a Lie.” Maybe that should be the title of the next show.
From the comments:
Gary Weglarz says:
October 12, 2018 at 11:57 am
“Assertions made convincingly enough are the new facts for a population hypnotized by a stage-managed reality show.” – we see this form of mass madness from the latest confirmation hearings, to Russiagate, to the so called “Skripnal” poisoning in the U.K. We’ve watched it unfold over and over again in our war propaganda: “Kuwaiti incubator babies,” “Weapons of mass destruction,” “Gaddafi’s viagra fueled rape camps,” “Gaddafi is about to commit genocide,” “Assad is gassing his own people,” ad nauseam.
Yet still Americans demonstrate an amazing ability to forget they were just lied to, over and over again no less, and we continue to express faithful, almost childlike belief in the latest lies, as if our very lives depended upon it. Perhaps they do. One senses that the typical American psyche would shatter like glass into a thousand pieces if even a hint of actual “reality” were to be allowed through our collective societal filters. So much easier to sleep at night when one can claim we must bomb and kill for “humanitarian” reasons, rather than for empire and plunder.
