Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. *
In case you were wondering, every time I hear or see or read the same, lavishly remunerated sock puppets jackhammering home the same, patently false Centrist narrative for the umpteen millionth time from impregnable media fortress that reach several million more people a week than I ever have or ever will, this is what it sounds like to me:
From "Brave New World":
"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked.
"We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."As corrupt and crippled as our politics has become, our system still demands that, every few years, the people who make our laws undergo a certain amount of scrutiny and an up-or-down hiring decision by the people they propose to represent.
The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.
"Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet."
At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.
"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."
The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.
Once more the Director touched the switch.
"… so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because …"
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"
But as you may have noticed, that scrutiny is now routinely bent out of shape -- so wildly distorted that on any give day all we seem to have is a choice of poisons; a fire-hose of relentless Conservative lies, irrelevant trivia, breathless horse-race gibberish, poll number recitations and 30 second ads.
And that is because the deciders who dictate the parameters of that political discussion -- the Villagers who conspire to whisper "I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki." into our nation's ears a hundred times a day from a dozen angles -- are themselves almost never scrutinized and held to account at all.
If they were, I would happily walk away from blogging tomorrow because if they were people David Brooks would never be able to keep his day job after going on Hate Radio to put Barack Obama on the couch
barely four-months after an ambarassing, tearful, emo public breakup
with That Man from Chicago...
...and barely a week after finding public solace in the arms of a 15th century calificador working for the American branch of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
* (from "1984")
3 comments:
This. This is fucking brilliant. Thank you.
a majority of the general population does not have or aspire to have any critical thinking ability. this is the low hanging fruit that the forces of the right have so skillfully co-opted. the struggle to raise people's consciousness is indeed a steep uphill climb. undemocratic as it is, one sometimes wishes that voting rights required a competency test.
By the Great Ford! Excellent! Your post drove me to pull down my old copy of _Brave New World_ to enjoy it again after all these many years . . . and it also drives me to keep on denouncing liars on my own blog. One can only aspire to your level of creativity and wordsmithery, but even one such as myself can launch a few verbal stones at the likes of that slimey creep David Brooks.
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