It's tough to be a history buff when you know a significant percentage of our collective storylines is a cruel masquerade. In fact, reading or watching any mainstream news media source is like rooting for clean pinfalls in pro wrestling. It's all dirty, it has to be, that's intrinsic in politics the white way as it must be in sex the white way. The President-elect is brilliant partially because he knows how to play white more effectively than Godfrey Cambridge in "Watermelon Man", who gave away the game soon after the opening credits by racing buses and beating them.
Being white is not racial. It's all about closing doors and telling visitors you have no secrets. White people of all ethnicities despise the truth, embracing visions that bear no burden of color. We need to close our eyes against solid white, the lack of color hurts too much. Therein lies the ineffable power of snow blindness. Disinformation is lethal and like many other toxins we persistently consume it.
I don't spend every day thinking about how phony many of our news items and historical phallacies are, but extreme skepticism does come to mind most days. Oddly enough, our authorized beards, our disseminators of dissembling, don't even have to push details too far down our gullets to make us forget we have a gag reflex. We're told that the Mumbai attacks may not have been perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but they're like al-Qaeda, so what's the diff? We're told that the attackers are Pakistani without anyone being escorted into custody yet. As with 9.11 and most of the other bad guy terror attacks dating back to the Haymarket Square hoax, the disseminators know what the bad guys are into and where they come from about five seconds after the attacks occur, but the bad guys don't claim credit for the attacks the way actual terrorists do.
What matters is that we--the good ones, the whites of all shades--must have a common enemy, preferably shadow-clad, very dumb enuff to both frighten us that they're capable of anything and reassure us that they're bound to lose. White folks don't do nuance, and that includes the real Indians. The terrorists our protectors fashion must not make sense; they must obliterate civilians irrationally, counterproductively, in order to make any motive indefensible and mobilize counterinsurgent opposition in the hearts and gonads of the masses, never mind the minds.
The straw men must be flammable and they must elude permanent elimination. Institutional power cannot survive without the nourishment of fear. Ideologies like laissez-faire economics and neocon imperialism can wither and crumble in the changing zeitgeist, but NATSEC is the ever-standing idol we must worship--and our whitest gods decay whenever the feast of demonic blood runs dry.
3 comments:
Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’ BBC doc “The Power of Nightmares"? It follows some of the same lines as your post. I'd recommend it.
Looks like you can view it free here: http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
no, but I've read about it and look forward to seeing it...
hey thanx for continuing to read this after the short layoff...how are you and yours? feel free to answer on bookface or gmail if you'd rather...
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