House of Eratosthenes

Cliff Kincaid, writing for Men’s Health Daily, speaks the unspeakable that our Government-Entertainment Complex elitist layers will not allow to be uttered in “Al Qaeda Loves Our Unpatriotic Media”. It is exactly what it sounds like.

We have to face up to the fact that the enemy has the U.S. on the run, using our own media against us. When Al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, recently threatened a Vietnam in Iraq, he was referring to an American defeat but it’s clear that he was not just referring to the military aspect of the conflict. The U.S. was not defeated militarily in Vietnam. We lost because our own media came to believe it was a cause not worth fighting. That caused the American people to lose heart and the Congress to cut and run. We are seeing the same thing happen in regard to Iraq. And the worst may be yet to come.

If I live to be three hundred years old I will never forget how this went down. The aforementioned Government-Entertainment Complex elitist layer of our society, has been censoring this kind of speech the way they censor everything else: Through ridicule.

They turn it around a hundred and eighty degrees. With a battle cry of “free speech for me but not for thee!” they ridicule anybody who would declare a polar difference, or even a nominal difference, between patriotism and slandering of our executive branch. Attacks on the cabinet-level officers, attacks on the generals, even attacks on enlisted men can never be called “unpatriotic,” or any synonym for same, nor can any doubt be expressed that even fallacious attacks are anything but patriotic — or else onward comes the ridicule. They even ridiculed this preliminarily, making their point by saying “my patriotism has been questioned” when the facts were not on their side.

I personally find that fascinating. It’s a kind of weird censorship-through-slander-about-alleged-censorship. Up until now, we’ve all known that the anti-war leftists in fact enjoy much greater freedom of speech than anyone else, de facto if not de jeure. Even observing that is an idea that has not been allowed to resonate, because as we observe it individually, we’re not allowed to communicate it with each other.

Weird as it may seem, you’re reading what may save us. Not this particular blog, of course, because as I keep pointing out nobody reads this blog. But the bloggers will save us.

No longer are we connected to a central authority such as Jennings/Cronkite/Rather/Brokaw, like spokes connected to a hub. News travels differently now. You read my blog, I read yours. The connections look more like the strands of a net. There is no “hub”.

I have the view that real democracy is a pipe dream, until we fully eradicate that bicycle-spokes model. With no hub, I get to write posts on my blog that say “Hey wait a minute…what reason does Tim Robbins have for thinking the White House was behind efforts to shut him up?” You can read what I write, and if you disagree, ignore it; but if you agree, now you have the same question. Now we have two people wondering the same thing, and from then on it’s like the shampoo commercial. You tell two friends, and so on, and so on.

The Robbins-Sarandon-style of censorship has every chance of success with the bicycle-spokes model. Practically guaranteed success. Tim Robbins can give a speech filled with examples of private-sector censorship — which do not infringe upon First Amendment guarantees, in any way — and gratuitously, with nothing to back up the connection at all, attach these instances to the White House, in effect manufacturing a serious constitutional transgression. The blogosphere can peel this sham like a grapefruit, as millions of us sync up asking the obvious and unanswered question: “Waitaminnit! What has this to do with the government censoring you?”

If the Brokaw/Rather/Jennings trio simply dipped a microphone into such a tirade and showed clips of it, perhaps playing the entire thing back for us, without a way for us to interconnect there’d be nothing else for us to do…except sit there and nod dutifully, “why, that George W. Bush. That dirty rat. I know you were behind all these things, Tim Robbins said so. And he’s been in way more movies than you have.”

I don’t mean to imply that Cliff Kincaid must be right simply because there is an effort to shut up people like him. That would be pretending I don’t know of one of the “Things I Know” (#20). But I do agree with Mr. Kincaid, and it’s interesting to note how much resistance such a sentiment arouses when it is spoken. Resistance, that is, with plenty of ridicule, condescension, condemnation, recoil and malicious jocularity — but lacking much, if any, persuasive argument as to why we should not agree.

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You’re Not Allowed To Say ThisFriday, August 19th, 2005

You’re Not Allowed To Say This
Friday, August 19th, 2005