The Voice of Empire, Ctd.

The Cargo Cults of Sunday Morning (from the immortal Richard Feynman.)

... So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science. I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. ...

Maybe it's just because I'm clearing out my bookshelves and have excavated a lot of old friends from the back bunk of double-shelved paperback purgatory, but the Mouse Circus today felt uncannily like something from some half-remembers Bradbury story; something with a long-dead world full of machines that had been so cunningly constructed that they outlasted their makers and their purposes by millennia. Maybe a future Earth or Bradburian Mars or some abandoned blog of a planet a 1000 light-years away where the faintest flicker of movement -- an insect landing on a pressure plate, or a shadow thrown by something flitting across the face of the sun -- cause great machinery buried far below the surface to cease their endless, fastidious loop of silent self-maintenance and leap to life. Or an imitation of life. Moving sidewalk designed for distinctly non-human bodies begin to roll. Distant music played by long-dead, alien orchestras and committed to the planet's digital memory by long-dead, alien record industry scum waft into the dessicated air once again. Telescreens begin to glow pale yellow in every empty home and in every empty plaza. And the animatronic creatures which once mouthed reassuring scripted homilies to the long-dead-and-gone citizens of the tomb city begin to move their creaking jaws and click their marble eyes in rhythms that had been choreographed to the last sigh and smile a thousand thousand lonely years ago. So it was watching David Gregory: purposeless, precise, and robotically obedient to a set of moldering instructions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the country we actually live in now or the problems we actually face today. This week, "Meet the Gregory featured a Republican, another Republican, a former Republican, David Axlerod and an SNL comedian. Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: I haz a sad about deficits, Fluffy. David Gregory: What is it, multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg? Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: I think that to be Serious, both sides need to make Sacrifices. David Gregory: Why don't I let you just ramble uninterrupted about that for awhile? Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: Gee, Fluffy, that'd be swell! A long ramble ensues. Apparently we're going to let Brazilians and Russians homestead Detroit if they promise to stick around five years and poop gold. David Gregory: Are you done yet? Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: No. And another thing; Obama needs to be nicer to businesses! Because (and this is pretty much a direct quote), "whether banks should or should not be 'attacked' is NOT the issue." David Gregory: Now? Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: Not yet. You know banks are in the business of taking insanely reckless risks with other people's money. It's what we ask them to do. Then they nearly destroy the global economy, because it's what we ask them to do. Then, win or lose, they dole themselves out billions of dollars in bonuses , because it's what we ask them to do. Virginia's Republican Governor Bob McDonnell: That Obama fella should leave Wall Street alone! Multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg: Testify brother! I will give it up for Axlerod on two point where, if what happens to meat puppets on teevee every really mattered, at least two of the people he shared a stage with today would be going home with broken bones. First, in answer to Fluffy's bullshit intro Birther question -- "Why did Obama wait so long...?" -- Axlerod punched Gregory's amirk right off this face. Axlerod: You know, Greggers, Trump didn't get wall-to-wall coverage by magic. He didn't end up in a fucking split-screen with the President of the United States thanks to enchanted gnomes. It was you assholes in the press who decided to make him the fucking story that made all of this come to pass, right Greggers? David Gregory: La-La-La-La! I-cannot-hear-you!. As a certain podcast has been harping for months, the Gingrich/Wolfowitz-grade slime you see oozing from your teevee didn't just happen -- teevee executives with names and phone numbers and email addresses chose to put it there. Who are they? Where do they work? How can they be reached? This is the nerve Axlerod touched and that Gregory clearly did not want to talk about. The second haymaker Axlerod landed was on the mighty, jut-jawed budget balancing happytalk of the aforementioned Republican governor of the state of Virginia who, after expressing his confidence that "Americans" come together in the face of natural disaster to rebuild and restore that which has been devastated (which is going to come as a huge relief to the citizens of New Orleans, who apparently just have to wait a liiiittle but longer)...noted that.... Virginia's Republican Governor Bob McDonnell: As a governor, I can't just fuck around and run up debt forever. No siree. We governors have to balance our budgets every year. Axlerod: You know, Governor, that I love you like a milkshake, but before you break an arm patting yourself on the back for being King of the Deficit Hawk Badasses let me remind you that you "balanced" your budget this year by using an assload of federal Recovery Act money, and by borrowing another assload of cash that some future governor is going to have to pay back. Virginia's Republican Governor Bob McDonnell: But...see...I'm a governor...and...um, y'know, I balance budgets. And stuff. Axlerod: Tell it to the fucking Marines, Governor. Gregory further distinguished himself by asking and answering his own "racism" question (because self-administering crotch tangos is what Fluffy does best) and by obligingly refusing to ask Republican Marco Rubio any substantive follow-up questions . Upon seeing Gregory gamely humping Republican legs and defending the Villager Party Line, the Right went berserk in the same, predictable way it always does:

Watch Gregory solicitously serve as a weekend fill-in for White House press sec Jay Carney. ... ...Turning to the tornadoes, Gregory heaped more praise...

Next week, Fluffy promised to reveal How the Tea Party will influence stuff! (For the umpteenth time, repeat after me: There. Is. No. Fucking. Tea. Party. There is just the same, old, rage-drunk, bigoted GOP base in funny hats.) Further on down the dial, Michelle Bachmann professed her great love of Freedom and America. Sigh. To clear my head I switched over to a part three of a seven part PBS special, "Outcroppings: Our Nation's Greatest Rocky Protrusions." only to learn that it had been canceled due to protests from the Americans Who Love Freedom Very Much Foundation over the series' obvious endorsement of something something "homosexual agenda" something something ACORN something something Sharia Law! I didn't quite understand what the attractive young patriots at an organization I had never heard of before that very moment were so mad about, but I have since received very many LARGE, SPARKLY-FONTED emails in various persuasive colors rampant on giant American Flag and/or bald eagle backgrounds which, by using the word "folks" a lot and including literally tens of links to World Net Daily and "Big Government" posts, has completely convinced me that, whatever the details of this particular controversy might be, as a Real American, I should be outraged by whatever it is that Rupert Murdoch wants me to be outraged by this week. And with that the Great Meaningless Mouse Circus Machine clanked and callioped to a stop and slid back into its cubby where it waits patiently for its next cue from the dying American empire that constructed the damnable thing for reasons now lost to history.