From Smirking Chimp
How nations can become dangerously paranoid (Dr Strangelove)
(Image by YouTube, Channel: David Tuffley) Details DMCA
The effects of humankind-created Climate Chaos are proving to be more devastating than even the most grim predictions. Wealth inequity is worse than in the Gilded Age. The US empire wages perpetual war, hot and cold, overt and covert, including military brinksmanship with the nuclear power, The Russian Federation.
Speaking of the latter, the US media retails a storyline that would be considered risible if it was not so dangerously inflammatory; i.e., L'affaire du Russia-gate, wherein, according to the lurid tale, the sinister Vladimir Putin, applying techniques from the Russian handbook for international intrigue, Rasputin Mind Control For Dummies, has wrested control of the US Executive Branch of government and bends its policies to his diabolical will.
Ridiculous, huh? Yet the mainstream press promulgates and a large section of the general public believes what is clearly a reality-bereft tale, as all the while, ignoring circumstances crucial for their own economic well being; their safety, insofar as a catastrophic nuclear exchange; and the steps required to maintain the ecological criteria crucial for allowing the continued viability of human beings on planet earth.
A socio-cultural-political structure is in place wherein the individual is bombarded, to the point of psychical saturation, with self-serving, elitist manufactured media content. Decades back, news and entertainment merged, thus freedom of choice amounts to psychical wanderings in a wilderness of empty, consumer cravings and unquenchable longings. Moreover, personas are forged upon the simulacrum smithy of pop/consumer culture, in which, image is reality, salesmanship trumps (yes, Trumps) substance. Among the repercussions: A reality television con man gains the cultural capital to mount a successful bid for the US presidency.
Trump's ascendency should not come as a shock. Nor should desperate Democrat's embrace of Russia-gate/The Russians Are Coming (fool's) mythos. In essence, US citizens/consumers are the most successfully psychologically colonized people on planet earth. In the realm of the political, Democratic and Republican partisans alike, on cue, are prone to parrot the self-serving lies of their party's cynical elite, who, it is evident, by the utter disregard they hold towards the prerogatives of their constituency, view the influence-bereft hoi polloi with abiding disdain...that is, in the rare event they regard them at all.
The crucial question is: Whose and what agenda does the Russia-gate yarn serve? The answer is hidden in plain sight: the profiteers of US economic and militarist hegemony. The demonization and diminution of Russian power and influence is essential in order to maintain and expand US dominance and the attendant maintenance and expansion of the already obscene wealth of capitalism's ruling elite.
While It might seem we are mired in an (un-drainable) swamp of complexity, in reality, the political landscape is a bone-dry wasteland, wrought by a single factor -- the addictive nature of greed.
Moreover, the reality of Beginning Stage Human Extinction crouches just beyond the line of the horizon. All signs auger we lost souls of the Anthropocene must alter our course. Yet, we, stranded in the mind-parching wasteland of late stage capitalism, collectively, continue to stagger, mesmerized, towards mass media mirages leading us further and further into the hostile-to-life terrain.
Yet the wasteland's Establishment media outlets are doing a dead-on, although straight faced, impression, right out of Stanley Kubrick's satirical film of Cold War era madness, Dr. Strangelove, of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper's roiling with paranoia ranting about a Russian "conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids [of the US body politic]."
Hyperbolic? Take a perusal at the cover story of the Washington Establishment mouthpiece Newsweek, headlined: "PUTIN IS PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR III -- IS TRUMP?"
A sphincter-clinching tale of woe and warning promulgated by the same governmental entities and their corporate media stenographers who waxed apocalyptic about Iraq possessing weapon's of mass destruction; that an immediate NATO bombing campaign must be launched against the government of Muammar Gaddafi or else a mass slaughter of the innocent will be immanent; and regime change in Syria must proceed because Assad is gassing his own people.
Just what sort of an embittered cynic would call into question the credibility of and mistrust the motives of such paragons of probity? Yet, somehow, in regard to Russia-gate, liberals display scant to zip scepticism towards the stories peddled by this unelected, unaccountable clutch of hyper-authoritarian prevaricators. In fact, they are, in a cringe worthy spectacle, allowing themselves to be played like Dollar Store kazoos.
Although, I get it. The tangerine-tinged Terror Of Tweettown represents a hideous affront to common sense and common decency. But the same applies to his antagonists in the anti-democratic institutions of the US National Security State and Intelligence Community. While the mission statements of the bureaucracies in question declare they exist to protect the nation from all manner of threats to the safety of the citizenry, a study of their history and present day operations reveals their modus operandi serves to ensure obscene amounts of wealth continue sluicing into the already bloated coffers of the profiteers of global-wide operations of capitalist plunder.
I understand the desperate need for hope. To crave the quality is inherently human. Even to the point of being whipped into a tizzy by the Russia-gate imbroglio. Yet: All and all, an obsessive focus on Trump, the Orange Scylla, buffets one into the maw of the Washington Establishment's Charybdis. Again, I understand the sense of desperation: Trump's smug, bloated face, the grandiose squawk of his voice, and his crass, mean-spirited, petty-minded pronouncements and middle school bully taunts deserve to be resoundingly rebuked. His hubristic posturing simply begs for comeuppance. One is prone to grow plangent with magical thinking. One longs to witness the bully smirk smacked from his face as he is dispatched in disgrace, Richard Nixon-style, to his parvenu palace at Mar a Lago.
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