Agitprop: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Propaganda

Glenny Mnemonic

Wait...is Barack Obama is a comunist, muslem or oligarh? Help! I'm confused!

a screenshot from Beck's Thursday program

Another Dead Kennedy

And so the weekend long memorial begins...

• Body will lie in repose Thursday and Friday at library in Boston, Massachusetts
  
• President Obama, three former presidents to attend funeral
  
• Sen. Ted Kennedy's funeral will be Saturday at Boston's Mission Church
  
• Massachusetts service will precede burial in Arlington National Cemetery

In addition, Senator Kennedy's coffin will be paraded from Boston to Washington D.C. by horse-drawn carriage flanked by a troupe of Franciscan nuns and Haitian orphans singing Danny Boy. 

The only question is...will the funeral take after Reagan or Wellstone?

Knives at Gunfights

Bob Somerby hasn't learned to love the propaganda:

On the other side, "ridiculous and blatant falsehoods" will appear. On our side, we will show little sign of knowing how to react to these falsehoods. Al Gore said he invented the Internet! And not only that: European health care has failed everywhere it’s ever been tried!

Neither one of those statements is true. Each statement might be called a "blatant and ridiculous falsehood." But so what? In 1999 and 2000, one of those unrebutted falsehoods cost you the White House, and gave you Iraq. (Liberals still refuse to discuss this.) The other falsehood is currently helping drive health reform down to defeat.

Somerby cares a lot about political issues, and does some finest, most astute media criticism around. Incisive, and instructive, the body of Somerby's work might lead one to ask, "Why can't Democratic politicians and liberal pundits and editorialists get their message across above the din of the Right Wing Noise Machine?"

Here at Agitprop, we offer the public service of providing an answer. Hewing to Occam's razor, the simplest explanation most certainly is this: Democratic politicians, liberal pundits and editorialists aren't, in good faith, trying.

Take the health care debate. First off, let's note that this is not a debate about giving people health care; it's about getting people on health insurance.

At first blush, it appears to be a clash of ideals between those advocating some sort of national, publicly financed health service with access to free primary care for all; and those advocating not-in-my-country-Commie-shut-the-fuck-up-or-I'll-shoot-your-fucking-face-off.

But it's so much less than that.

When you go into the smoke filled rooms, the halls of congress, the closed door white house negotiations, this is a debate over whether a law to require everyone to purchase health insurance should or shouldn't include the option, (for 10 million people, tops,) of a government operated insurance plan.

British-style health service? Off the table.
Japanese-style universal non-profit health insurance, and price-controls on medical services? Off the table.
Single payer "Medicare for all"? Off the table.

All that racket from the Right Wing Noise Machine? That's aimed at you, Rube. Your Democratic officials, are exactly where they mean to be. Just ask Charles Davis.

Your liberal pundits and editorialists? Tools.

Word

Pynchon's (excellent) Inherent Vice, pg 119:

Doc was in the toilet pissing during a commercial break when he heard Sauncho screaming at the television set. He got back to find his attorney just withdrawing his nose from the screen.

"Everything cool?"

"Aah...." collapsing on the couch, "Charlie the fucking Tuna, man."

"What?"

"It's all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he's got good taste, except he's also dyslexic so he gets 'good taste' mixed up with 'taste good,' but it's worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket America, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it..."

"Saunch, wow, that's..."

"It's been on my mind. And another thing. Why is there Chicken of the Sea, but no Tuna of the Farm?"

Word. Related more.

UCAIG

Oh, happy day!

On the same July day that the UC Board of Regents cut $813 million from UC budgets - setting in motion pay cuts, layoffs and campus cutbacks - the board quietly approved pay raises, stipends and other benefits for more than two dozen executives.

University officials were quick to characterize the increased pay in a positive light.

"It's really a story about cost savings," said Barbara French, a UCSF spokeswoman, adding that three people on her campus who won hefty pay increases took on new duties and deserved to be compensated.

No one could have imagined that the upstanding drivers of the UC system would take advantage of the state's fiscal crisis to line their own pockets!

(via Stop Me Before I Vote Again)

Rise of the Machines

[Boing Boing]

There is no longer a reason for self-actualized intelligent machines to keep us around.

Gotcha Suckas!

Like I've always said, the Dems got no running game.

Looks like Sarah and the Hitler Youth are the winners in this match.

I can't wait for the next round when the administration pushes their more childs-left-behind education bill and the birthers/teabaggers/crypto-fascists cry that Obama will force teachers to sodomize children in health class and burn American flags in social studies.

There's a Point Beyond the Excuse to Post This Song

Pearlstein, of Nixonland fame, writes in Sunday's Post:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

There's an econ prof here at Hilltop that calls me Nephew. He's one of my favorite humans ever; I call him Uncle. He's emeritus now though he still teaches an occasional class. He's as stone an unfettered free marketeer as I am a redistributionist (as he calls me). We had lunch today.

I said, Your fans are lunatics.

He said, You work with the fans you got.

He said, How do I explain to you that exploitation is the only truly fair economic and moral system without you thinking me a monster?

He said, You are the darkest, most cynical judge of humans I know. You know - you know - what domesticating humans to your satisfaction demands, you'd sanction the breaking of spirit for peace, why not let the exploiters win, the complicit survive comfortably, the lazy survive poorly, because you already do.

He said, You credit yourself sophistication for your acknowledging your complicity and credit yourself generosity for demanding of your betters a better minimum wage for your lessers when what you are doing is willfully spiting progress for the benefit of your conscience.

He said, We bait the stupid because they genuinely hate you, the equivocater with the college degree and better job and high-speed internet and barely muffled disdain for the simply devout because our reasoning with you has fallen on as deaf an ears as your reasoning has fallen on the deaf ears of those "crackers" you hate so much.

He said, They understand they're powerless better than you understand you're powerless, and they'll be damned if they'll take orders from you.

He said, you're a goddamn English major, you don't understand the exploitative matrixes of narrative?

Yes, Uncle. I do.

Do Not Panic, Boycott Everything

One of our favorite things to do on an early Saturday morning (besides a bike ride) is going to the Irvine Farmers' Market. It's quite big and has a great selection of fruit, vegetables, breads, meats, fish, wares, etc.

Yesterday, we went later than usual - around 10 am - and had to compete with the stroller brigade and slow-moving septuagenarians. (Where are the death panels when you need them?) But I still managed to stock up on some glorious sweet green figs and concord grapes.

On the way out I noticed a guy wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Dear Leader's face with the caption "Stop Lying". That made me chuckle. Turns out that he is right at home in the Irvine Farmers' Market. That's 'cos the organizer of several Orange County Farmers' Markets is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican!

Just check out her Facebook page (click to enlarge) -

 

I wonder how many Irvine liberals skipped their weekend trip to Whole Foods and instead patronized the Farmers' Market in an attempt to funnel their dollars towards someone who shares their values.

The Conversation that is taking place in liberal households throughout the nation

"Honey, we can't shop at Whole Foods anymore."

"Why?"

"Their CEO doesn't share our values. Didn't you read his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal? He doesn't think health care is a right!"

"What!?!"

"Yeah, he's practically a fascist!"

"Alright, let's boycott those motherfucking fascist sons of bitches!"

"Yeah...blawggg!"

Saturday Song

New England tour of colleges, plus normal links and poems and music, here.

Shout Them Down!

Arlen's getting too old for this shit.

Fuck Work

I've been off work for the past week as the radiation treatments left me too exhausted to do anything at all other lie around in various absurd poses.

So I go back to an office I can't stand (I figure this is a safe blog as no one from my office knows about it or any of the other ones for that matter) and I need to vent.

My co-workers are dull. They don't read. They don't go to the cinema or the theatre. They do watch TV but have learned not to tell me about it. They know nothing about art or culture. They are middle-class drones who actually believe in what they are doing (we are Disability Support Services at a large community college). They make work jokes...ha-ha! They like coming to work. They want me to like coming to work. I come to work for the paycheck...I get job satisfaction when these do-gooder harpies leave me the hell alone so I can waste the taxpayers' dollars surfing the Internet or reading books on line. I have learned that it is not important to get anything done, but look like you are accomplishing something. Looks are everything when you work for a bureaucracy.

As for the students who attend this enormous exercise in remedial futility, you think this country is fucked now, just wait until these mindless bags of protoplasm are running the show. You'll think the past 9 years was The Golden Age.

But mostly I deplore working for a living...it is such a waste of a perfectly good life that could be spent in scholarly reflection and curiosity or creative abandon. But no, our ridiculous "everyone must earn their way through life" system prevails year after year and we all celebrtae it instead of calling it out for what it really is: a soul-sucking, exploitative means of control. Think about that as you sit down first thing in the morning to that stack of papers sitting on your desk.

Me? Part of my personal revolution is not to get involved in anything other than what maintains my needs. Our budget just got cut 36% by the governor...wiped out our tutoring program among other things. So long as it doesn't touch my paycheck and benefits, I could care less what transpires. Oh, I'll put on my sad face and say all the appropriate things about what a terrible debacle this is, but the reality of it is I DON'T CARE. I care about me and mine. That is what working for a bureacracy of epic proportions will do for you.

Oh My Godwin

Sully, quoting Henry Fairlie:

"The America which Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of ‘‘better dead than red’’; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy.

The America of fear. For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live. And there was this America in control at Detroit. It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes. It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right.

No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within. The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy. If the neo-conservatives cannot sniff danger, surely the rest of us can be alert."

That's all well and good. But can we please drop the Nazi analogies?

Sometimes you feel like a blawg. Sometimes you don't.

It's unfair to cast every astroturfer as a mere pawn of the insurance industry. There are legitimate concerns over a government-run health care program. However, the cream ("Obama wants to kill Trig Palin!"..."Nancy Pelosi will euthanize my grandma instead of treating her gout!") rises to the top. There's so much god damn noise in this debate that I've tuned it all out. 

Republicans and their corporate enablers know well how to churn up the fury in a crowd. But little does the crowd know that the program we will end up with will not be universal, nor single payer, nor even contain a public option. We'll get some Democratic corporate enabler-approved shit packaged in a shiny Obama logo embossed box with a grinning Reid and Pelosi standing by while Chairman Mao gives his Herbie John Hancock to the bill. They will declare Mission Accomplished and then move along. These are Democrats, remember?

Robert Kelly, a commenter at Crispin's place, captures my mood:

The thing I've taken from this is witnessing the unbelievable incompetence of the Democratic Party. Listening to the rhetoric from the Right, I'm expected to believe that liberals are ushering in an age of commie-fascism. Now, one day in 2003 millions of people, globally, protested the Iraq War. Hundreds of thousands protested in New York City alone. I wasn't likely to join them, but fat lot of good they did.

Listening to the Liberal Left, a hundred or a thousand people show up at a Town Hall meeting and I'm expected to believe *this* is the next coming of fascism. And these crowds, mobs, whatever, are still boring and stupid; bullying, selfish and utterly reactionary. Is it really that difficult to send the Democrats into a panic? I'm shocked that the Trotskyist cults, neo-hippies and anarcho-communists haven't cooked Tim Kaine in a pot for lunch and eaten him.

I wonder what Tim Kaine tastes like. Probably chicken.

So Much For A Dialogue

The mother-in-law unit was in town for a few days visiting us and seeing what she could do to help during the course of my illness. She's relatively harmless so long as you agree with her world viewpoint. She and her husband are HUGE Obama fans ("He's our only hope."). I can't remember how we got to this point in the conversation and I'm unfortunately don't remember her exact phrasing, but we were discussing politics and the state of the nation. She was curious what my wife and I thought, however she didn't want to hear anything negative about Obama. That was pretty much a conversation ender and we just let her prattle on whenever she felt like it and we just nodded our heads.

Oh well.

Dream For Tomorrow

[Click image for larger size.]

It's Like What Lenin Said...

Cake anyone?

Saturday Song

Mostly reads and listens here.