Ray,
Thanks for bringing Lee's posting to my attention. He's close, but not quite on the mark.
#reply-16695153 <<I don't think it is about growth. Just sustaining the economy over tough time troughs...We don't need fear, just enough of a perceived threat to keep the American public on board. Now that we have had an attack on our shores, we can probably milk this for at least 10 years if not more. By then, we hopefully will be in a new bull market. Lather Rinse Repeat.... We need an enemy of convenience at all times and will make sure we always have one. >>
From Thomas Pynchon's Gravitiy's Rainbow: <<It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology...by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more...The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms -- it was only staged to look that way -- but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...>>
And make no mistake about it. In a "free democracy" the "ruling elite" are not necessarily those with guns or the powers to make laws. The "manufacture of consent" necessary to get any official elected *(no matter how many political parties there are, llmarinen)* really is the ur-domain of marketeers and spin doctors.
Lee's posting hints of a bit of marketing apocrypha where a marketing manager told the shampoo company president he could instantly double the sales of the company's product with the addition of a single word to the product's directions for use -- Repeat. As in <<Lather, Rinse, Repeat.>>
Pynchon also wrote: <<What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. [Witness President Bush exhorting us all to visit the malls -- JiO] The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. >>
Santayana notwithstanding; like shampoo, history has repetition built right into its instruction set as authored by the victorious. And let's not forget, official secrecy is a prerequisite to official misinformation. "All the better to fool you with, my dears!"
Jerry in Omaha |
