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America In Transition

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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: July 28, 2008, 09:53:14 am »









Notes



8 That is, rarely within the borders of the USA does the suppression of dissent take the form of outright murder. But all over the world there are thousands of deaths attributable to the careful control our state-linked media holds over the American public’s worldview. For example, not much ink was devoted in the US press last summer to explain that the armaments Israel was using to bomb hospitals and fleeing refugees in Lebanon came from our very own Pentagon. The media presented the massacre as an unfathomable, if unfortunate, mess in a faraway land, having little to do with us. The number of Americans outraged by this genocidal episode, paid for by their own tax dollars, was thus minimized.

9 The notion that all issues boil down to two polarized sides is itself so ingrained that it seems not even to cross the public’s radar enough to be questioned. See June’s Daykeeper Journal “America in Transition”.

10 Meanwhile, several administrations’ worth of US Middle East policymakers have made no bones about what they mean by “winning.” And it has nothing to do with the people of Iraq, nor about styles of government. To these men, “winning” means securing military and economic control of the region. These goals are part of the public record; they are spelled out in no uncertain terms in neo-con policy statements such as the official National Security Council Strategy (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html) that anyone with access to a computer can read with their own eyes.  Even without resorting to the Internet, Americans could inform themselves of why their tax money is being poured into Iraq simply by reading in their very own newspapers (granted, it would probably require persevering into the back pages) and using their Mercuries to discern patterns of meaning. For instance, no secret was made of the fact that Paul Bremer’s primary post-Shock-and-Awe project was to privatize Iraq’s oil. He simply took control of it away from the people who lived there. But though the story was printed, its implications were not (nor did our intrepid “investigative reporters” deign to mention that by international law, an invading force does not have the right to pass legislation).

It is very unlikely that viewers of TV news shows think of any of this when they listen to discussions of “winning” in Iraq. The Karl Rove bunch has figured out that the most efficient way to keep the public’s ignorance intact is for media commentators to simply leave the word “winning” undefined. This keeps things nice and vague, encouraging the public to think of it in terms of coming home with the trophy at a golf tournament or soccer match.

11 When placed in Water and Fire signs, Mercury has an emotional coloration that it does not possess in Air and Earth. But relative to the other planets, unalloyed Mercurial logic is undistracted by the prejudicial vicissitudes of feeling.

12 Much of this over-ideologizing of simple information can be chalked up the to the transit of Pluto in Sagittarius (see “America in Transition” in February’s DayKeeperJournal), which tends to recast even the most clear-cut issues as elaborate moral crusades.

13 The recent anniversary of the dropping of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki offers us a timely symbol of the contrast between what Washington says and what Washington does. The strikes incinerated 370,000 human beings, 85% of them civilians. Formerly secret documents now prove that Truman’s White House knew full well at the time that Japan was on the verge of collapse and ready to surrender. The bombs were dropped not to “end the war,” as the White House insisted at the time, but to warn the newly ascendant Soviets of the American military’s indominability—basically the same motive behind the threats against Iran today.

14 If anything, our craving for immediate access to huge quantities of information, aided and abetted by a plethora of electronic gadgets whose ever-briefer shelf-life is designed to add to their trendy allure, leaches the intelligence out of our Mercuries rather than strengthening it. Researchers of ADD and other peculiarly modern mental disorders have found that after a certain quantity is reached, the amount of data flooding into the brain exists in inverse relation to the ability to apply it. A British study from 2005 concluded that information overload actually reduces IQ levels twice as much as smoking lots of pot. As James Tulip puts it, “The greatest threat to our democracy is not from evil or incompetent leaders but from an electorate with the attention span of a gerbil on crack.”
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