From Veterans Today...
HOW DO I KNOW I AM GETTING BETTER?
Getting better is like waking up from a nightmare and finding you have been sleeping in your own excrement.
When you have washed yourself off and tossed the sheets into the trash, step one is to head to the cable box, go to “favorite channels” and remove; Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and any of the “Christian” stations. Then head to the computer, find your favorite places and delete everything that doesn’t help contain pornography or advice on fixing your truck.
Then get a new email account. Remember how you got sick in the first place and that you had read, literally hundreds of emails making claims proven to be utterly false. Remember what happened in Nazi Germany, a culture was built on propaganda and pretty-soon you find yourself standing in the snow in Russia. “Yesterday I couldn’t spell gulag and now I live in one.”
Gordon Duff is a former Marine, a commentator and a pretty smart guy. Today he addresses the Tea Party movement, comparing being in it to having some awful disease. Terminal dumb assitis, I suspect. I recommend his stuff and the rest of the site to anyone who has served, knows someone who served or can't believe what they're seeing on the news...are we really that goddamn ignorant and dumb?
Well, yes. Or drugged... on media and conventional wisdom.
(I need to admit that I write for this site under an assumed name, and occasionally will cross post stuff here from there. This is in the interest of full disclosure to the hordes of people naming themselves after contemporary approaches to aphrodisiacs who are really confused about this site. My brothers are not helping here...they have lives and other projects. I'd like more comments on this site, but being asked questions about guitars by someone naming himself after a hard-on drug does pass the time.)
The only hope I have based on the more recent news is that maybe Americans are not as dumb as they sound. I was disappointed in the MSNBC special on Tim McVie; it was a good piece of journalism, but there needed to be more connection between the nonsense on talk radio and in the conservative, heartland media and his decision to kill 164 people just because. However, the relative no show status at the Virginia-DC gun nuts events indicated one thing...some of these people have lives and maybe, some vestigial shame. Maybe they compared their income tax returns this year to last and did a quick Emily-Latella "Never Mind..." Maybe they had to go to a funeral for cousin Bob, who just got back last year with PTSD and TBI and missing an eye and all, and he was found dead under a bridge because because the VA is back logged.
Gordon begins the article by listing all the Tea-Party complaints and asking what sort of person complains about A happening when A is definitely not fucking happening! His answer is a sick person who needs to get well. My answer is different: pissed off sheep. They know they're getting screwed, and they look to the guy with the shears as the authority figure, and the guy tells them, it's the people who are opposed to shearing and screwing sheep who are shearing and screwing you! And, they believe, and get in line...
surely FOX news/talk radio nonsense plays a role in motivating and promoting much of the tea party activity we are seeing, but are potential Timothy McVeighs really created or driven by it? this guy
http://hammeroftheblogs.blogspot.com/2010/04/humes-paradox.html
saw a kind of coherence in McVeigh's sick purpose that the media nonsense doesn't seem to provide. it might be that such propaganda 'creates an atmosphere,' or 'emboldens,' and to the extent that it does i suppose there is room for criticism. however a lot of the counter-tea party rhetoric about seditious incitement and whatnot, to me, borders on thought policing.
Posted by: Montag | 22 April 2010 at 05:02 AM
I don't think that talk radio or Fox can create much of anything; and, I suspect that McVeigh was borderline PTSD at best when he enlisted, let alone after the Gulf War. Certainly, while he made an attempt to rationalize what he was doing when he dropped out of the Special Forces Qualification Course, he was in pretty tough shape. He then retreated into himself and the voices in his head took over. Now, that happens to a lot of folks; however, the crazy voices in his head kept getting validated. Encouraged. His friends enabled him. And, kaboom...
I've heard a lot of crazy shit from the left over the years; in my youth, I said a few crazy things too. But, there were always things that blocked the absolute craziness; there were rational voices in my head. There weren't any in his head, in his life.
As for the counter-tea party stuff, well, a lot of what the tea party movement is saying is seditious. However, we don't have anti-sedition laws in the this country and haven't for decades. The problem arises when somebody starts acting on the sedition; and, blows up a building. I guess I'm calling for a robust debate with lots of fact checking. Hahahahahahah.
Posted by: Crusader AXE | 22 April 2010 at 11:54 AM