House of Eratosthenes

Everybody wants to be an independent thinker, it seems. So many people appear to think it’s easy. Well, it isn’t. Being an independent thinker takes a lot of — and you could never guess this if you were not experienced with it — humility. That’s because everyone has what it takes to digest a talking point, regurgitate it without fact-checking it, and believe against the evidence that they’ve mulled it over. You have to learn from experience to be an independent thinker. You have to admit when you’ve been duped.

And the sad fact is, most people don’t do this. Most people haven’t even spent time in an environment where they can be duped…and, subsequently, be placed in a situation where they’ll be forced to admit that’s what happened. Most people are cloistered within happy lifestyles in which they can be duped, blissfully, six different ways before breakfast, and never become aware of it.

I can prove this easily.

A society chock full of critical thinkers…we wouldn’t have, or tolerate, anniversaries of terrible events like Hurricane Katrina. What in the BLUEFUGG is the point of an anniversary? It is nothing more than a commandment from a layer of elites way-on-high, down to the dirty-unwashed commoners, to spend lots of time thinking about a certain thing, masquerading beneath a costume of “news.”

It’s a year after Katrina. How does this affect you? Maybe pretty drastically — if you happen to be living one year ago. But you’re not. You’re here. You’re now. The hurricane isn’t happening. This is not news; it simply isn’t.

Now, how many “Katrina, One Year Later” stories have you seen this week? On the boob tube? On the “innernets”? On the radio? In newspapers? In magazines? It’s freakin’ everywhere. Those in the news, really aren’t doing an adequate job of talking about anything else. Nothing else going on? Come on, now, you can’t seriously say that. Compared to the one-year anniversary of something that happened a year ago and isn’t happening now, we got a lot of stuff going on that, quite simply, is more important.

Ah, but anniversaries affect how people feel. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. The oh-so-unbiased and oh-so-objective editors who have no political axe to grind whatsoever, are simply being sensitive and responsive to the way people feel on the first anniversary of a hurricane that’s not around anymore.

Okay, let’s go for that.

In less than six months, we’re going to have the sixty-fifth anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066 in which thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned in violation of their constitutional rights.

Gee, that should arouse some pretty spicy feelings, right? Especially now, in this day & age wherein President Bush is oppressing the civil liberties of American citizens by signing executive orders authorizing their intern…

Whoops, that’s right, I forgot. He’s not doing that. Nothing close to it.

Yeah, but I’ll bet he’s going to do it any day now! The Founding Fathers wanted us to be deeply suspicious of our government doing stuff like that, waking up every single morning expecting our government to encroach on our civil liberties, regardless of what a wonderful job the government did vindicating itself the day before. Right?

Right. That’s the essence of a patriotic attitude here in America.

So…a 65th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 would be pretty constructive. And patriotic. What a useful reminder that would be, of where we might be going.

Maybe even a useful reminder, for those who care to observe it, of the decent job the current administration has done balancing security against liberty — when viewed against the backdrop of history, and previous presidents who executed a far clumsier, and downright inferior job, of this delicate task.

And we’re big into the “lessons learned” thing, which is why we’re having a Katrina Plus One media orgy in the first place. That is what it’s all about. Right? Right?

So…bring on that 65th anniversary. I’m sure it’s coming. The letters G-O-O-G-L-E will be tastefully wrapped in barbed wire when you go to the search engine’s main page. Time Magazine will have a splash cover with a sinister looking FDR looking down into the camera, with the smoke from his jauntily-angled cigarette swirling maliciously in the air around him, while in the foreground a pathetic little Japanese kid peeks out from behind a fence. Editorial cartoons will pockmark the newspapers, all about this terrible thing Roosevelt did 65 years ago. Perhaps a special-issue dime will come out in 2007, with Roosevelt’s face taken off the heads-side and big letters that say “WE ARE SORRY” stamped in his place. Maybe we’ll even have a movie or two.

No…no, I don’t think so. Let’s step back in the real world for a second here. It’s not happening. That isn’t what “anniversaries” are all about. They are simply cogs carefully installed in the machinery to spin a certain way, mesh a certain way, and control what the dirty little people think about things, according to what the watchmaker has in mind.

The anniversary is just one device among money in the mystic’s toolbelt. Think on this. How many times a year are we told “everybody” is concerned about something? And what machinery do we have in place, to lift such sentiments, accurately, from the bedrock social strata that really is “everybody”? We are given messages like this constantly. Multiple times weekly, let alone annually. And on what “everybody” is really thinking, we don’t know a tenth of a percent about anything. Nor, when you think about it for a while, should you really even care.

But in a democratic society, big, important people have a great deal invested in what “everybody” is thinking. Or…what “everybody” can be fooled into thinking that “everybody” else is thinking.

And so we have anniversaries of things. That is all they are supposed to be, and that is all they are.

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We’re All Such Independent ThinkersWednesday, August 30th, 2006

We’re All Such Independent Thinkers
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006