You gotta love this President. I mean, he knows that words don't really mean anything. They are just squiggles and sounds. So if you don't care what you say, you can be both the villain and pose for photos as the white knight in shining flight-suit who's protecting everybody from evil. It's kind of a reverse Zorro or Robin Hood.
You know the old story. Rich and powerful villain in charge of governingment thinks he can do anything to the poor ordinary peons and get away with it. And he can, so long as he controls the army/police and can label his victims in such a way as to make them seem less-than-you-and-me. Criminals. Enemy Combatants. Unpatriotic Obstructionist Alarmist Racist Liberal Democrats.
In the stories, the label-ees are outcasts until someone of pure heart champions them. Then we are reminded of our duty to our fellow humans, our love of justice blossoms and we turn on the evildoers. Only today, it's the Compassionate Conserver himself who's robbing and pillaging and blaming the peons, not the Sheriff of Nottingham. The rhetoric is so dizzyingly doubled that ordinary people get lost in the shell game and pick the empty lie every time.
***
The lies inside this story is too complicated and too petty to be interesting to your average citizen. Too much thinking for too little result. So is the lies in the case of the prisoners at Guantanamo. And the rollbacks of clean air and water regulations. And the zero funding for enforcement of many federal protections of your common citizen. They have nice names like Homeland Security, the Healthy Forests law, the Corporate Responsibility bill, but the devil is in the details.
Words is not nothing. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can destroy your freedom and leave you naked on the heath when you are too old to fight any more. All it takes is for good people to trust the cover instead of reading the book and do nothing.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
BLACK AND WHITE
Your liberals, they accuse the conservatives of doing this terrible thing they call 'distorting the truth' just because folks like the President describe the world in black and white. Right or wrong. Freedom loving or terrorist. With us or against us. Tough or soft. Screwer or screwee. Okay, so some of those soldiers in Iraq, they took it maybe too much to heart. But you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And the souflee in the oven of history right now is all about hot air and oil rising to new heights of wealth for all Americans who are real Americans, namely your Financial Aristocrats Teamed with Haliburton, Enron, and Arabia Dividing the Spoils. (FATHEADS)
Black and white is not a distortion, it's just a way of eliminating the gray matter from day to day life. Self-examination reveals too many personal flaws. Seeing your mistakes is depressing. Shame is embarassing. This is why studies show that when a person does something bad to another, the mind quickly explains to the Self that since the Self is basically good, the Other must have done something terrible to cause Saint Self to treat Mr. Other so bad. Then a little imagination and you have weapons of mass distruction just lying all over the place and the blame along with the shame falls neatly and happily onto the victim. Saint and Demon. Black and white.
But you say it's still a distortion to make what isn't black and white into what is. Try telling that to my dog. Blanche ain't got no cones in her eyes, only rods. She sees the same tennis ball I see, only I gotta live with the sick yellow-green color while she happily gets to have it in gray. All of you who want the President to put himself in your shoes; how about a little compassion for a guy who don't have the cones in his head to see shades of color or nuance. It's like a handicap. You shouldn't make fun of him for that.
Black and white is not a distortion, it's just a way of eliminating the gray matter from day to day life. Self-examination reveals too many personal flaws. Seeing your mistakes is depressing. Shame is embarassing. This is why studies show that when a person does something bad to another, the mind quickly explains to the Self that since the Self is basically good, the Other must have done something terrible to cause Saint Self to treat Mr. Other so bad. Then a little imagination and you have weapons of mass distruction just lying all over the place and the blame along with the shame falls neatly and happily onto the victim. Saint and Demon. Black and white.
But you say it's still a distortion to make what isn't black and white into what is. Try telling that to my dog. Blanche ain't got no cones in her eyes, only rods. She sees the same tennis ball I see, only I gotta live with the sick yellow-green color while she happily gets to have it in gray. All of you who want the President to put himself in your shoes; how about a little compassion for a guy who don't have the cones in his head to see shades of color or nuance. It's like a handicap. You shouldn't make fun of him for that.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
PRESIDENTIAL MEMORY LOSS
The President gave a masterful speech last night. He didn't waste no words on stuff that didn't turn out like he expected because he has the kind of mind that don't waste memory space on disagreeable details. He keeps his eye on the big picture.
Science has now proved that the brains of great men are special and this is why they rise to leadership. See, a brain is lots of nerves that have dendrites to connect them to other nerves and carry their thoughts around inside their heads. In the brains of your Captains of Industry and State, the dendrites are thick like a wrestler's neck and slick like a skating rink. Thoughts go from point 'A' to point 'B' lickety-split. In fact, point 'A' ALWAYS leads to point 'B,' and does it faster than you can say 'complexity.' This is how they get so rich - they are not sidetracked by conflicts between self-interest and morality. They just speed down the slalom trying to win, and if conflict is ignored and doubt devalued, fortunes are made, elections are won, and America is the envy of the world.
Your intellectuals and Democraniacs, they have what you call fuzzy dendrites. Their nerves branch this way and that and connect to different parts of the brain depending on how they put the thoughts together. Their brains can go from point 'A' to any other point in the alphabet, and do it from a variety of points of view. Very flexible but very slow and never quite as sure that 'B' is the only possible answer to question 'A.'
So, for mainstream Republican conservatives, when facts don't fit, their brains, which are going so fast down the same icy road to the bottom of things, run right over any uncomfortable facts and squash them flat. And We the People are happy, because we get to go on a real fast ride that ends up at the same place as always, where the staffers serve the same artificially-flavored and -colored food just the way we like it, never mind the salt and fat content setting a person up for obesity, diabetes, and a coronary. Talking about that just ruins the meal, and makes you the sourpuss who don't want anybody else to have no fun.
With liberals, the answer is always in doubt rather than the facts, and so you have to be willing to take the trip not knowing your route or even where you'll end up in the end. How many families do you know would survive a vacation like that?
Then there's the moral indignation quotient. Reagan was the perfect President because he had Alzheimer's all the time he was President. He continued to talk about trickle-down and tax cuts helping your ordinary folk with such earnest moral force because he lived in a mind didn't remember disagreeable facts.
Bush don't have the Alzheimer's advantage, but his brain was softened with so much alcohol and cocaine in his youth, it probably leads to the same result - true moral indignation without a hint of self-doubt or apology for errors of judgement because as far as he can remember, he never made any. Anyone who says otherwise is just willfully playing politics with the facts as he knows them.
Science has now proved that the brains of great men are special and this is why they rise to leadership. See, a brain is lots of nerves that have dendrites to connect them to other nerves and carry their thoughts around inside their heads. In the brains of your Captains of Industry and State, the dendrites are thick like a wrestler's neck and slick like a skating rink. Thoughts go from point 'A' to point 'B' lickety-split. In fact, point 'A' ALWAYS leads to point 'B,' and does it faster than you can say 'complexity.' This is how they get so rich - they are not sidetracked by conflicts between self-interest and morality. They just speed down the slalom trying to win, and if conflict is ignored and doubt devalued, fortunes are made, elections are won, and America is the envy of the world.
Your intellectuals and Democraniacs, they have what you call fuzzy dendrites. Their nerves branch this way and that and connect to different parts of the brain depending on how they put the thoughts together. Their brains can go from point 'A' to any other point in the alphabet, and do it from a variety of points of view. Very flexible but very slow and never quite as sure that 'B' is the only possible answer to question 'A.'
So, for mainstream Republican conservatives, when facts don't fit, their brains, which are going so fast down the same icy road to the bottom of things, run right over any uncomfortable facts and squash them flat. And We the People are happy, because we get to go on a real fast ride that ends up at the same place as always, where the staffers serve the same artificially-flavored and -colored food just the way we like it, never mind the salt and fat content setting a person up for obesity, diabetes, and a coronary. Talking about that just ruins the meal, and makes you the sourpuss who don't want anybody else to have no fun.
With liberals, the answer is always in doubt rather than the facts, and so you have to be willing to take the trip not knowing your route or even where you'll end up in the end. How many families do you know would survive a vacation like that?
Then there's the moral indignation quotient. Reagan was the perfect President because he had Alzheimer's all the time he was President. He continued to talk about trickle-down and tax cuts helping your ordinary folk with such earnest moral force because he lived in a mind didn't remember disagreeable facts.
Bush don't have the Alzheimer's advantage, but his brain was softened with so much alcohol and cocaine in his youth, it probably leads to the same result - true moral indignation without a hint of self-doubt or apology for errors of judgement because as far as he can remember, he never made any. Anyone who says otherwise is just willfully playing politics with the facts as he knows them.
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