Diary: Thinking Beyond the Box

Those of us who look beyond the pap smeared onto our TV screens and newspapers by a complicit media to learn what's really happening have the additional challenge of separating real events and stories from staged or fictional ones. Mutually exclusive narratives, even when they are supported by what is presented as evidence, such as the Sarah Palin 'Babygate' controversy, are themselves a story to be dealt with, because spin and misdirection are not the only tools at the disposal of those who wish to control the public debate. They also fabricate stories out of thin air, and present them as fact. Witness the bogus Senate testimony about fictional babies being tossed from non-existant incubators that was offered by a shill in the run-up to the first Gulf War. It happens, and we must become more aware of it. One way to do this is to engage in a bit of our own fictionalization.

Imagining what might happen is often disparaged by those whose actions we are most worried about. They use emotional tactics to paint people concerned about the implications of what are claimed to be innocuous changes to law and governance as paranoid whiners. Yet this very tactic must also be recognized for what it is. As George Lakoff explains in "The Political Mind", progressive politics is rooted in compassion for others, and the idea that a partnership relationship is how people ought to relate to one another in order to preserve and protect the common good. In contrast, the politics promoted by the GOP is built upon obedience to authority, which results in a society in which the many are dominated by the few. Emotional tactics are therefore specifically engineered to use our strength -- our concern for others -- as a bludgeon to cause us to back down from confronting those who wish to control us.

I practice pre-emptive fictionalization of current events at my short story blog -- http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com -- by writing short vignettes of the kinds of things that might happen if what I see reported at OpEdNews and elsewhere is allowed to continue. For example, after reading a report at BoingBoing.net about how the TSA at LAX stopped and threatened a hallway full of travelers in what was a described as a 20 minute game of 'freeze tag', I wrote a story called "Incident on Concourse B" about what might happen if a situation like that went horribly wrong. More recently, after George W. Bush as much as called the Supreme Court justices traitors for ruling in support of Habeus Corpus rights for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, I wrote a story called "Judicial Restraint" about what might happen if he charged the court formally. There are many others.

In order to understand what is at stake if the vision of those who founded this nation is blinded by those whose world is built on submission to authority, we need to imagine it clearly. Inoculate yourself today.