War and Culture

“Queen for a Day” awarded down-to-earth prizes to the winner of the most sympathy: a washing machine or refrigerator, baskets of food, articles of clothing or shoes, etc. Among its vestiges of a bygone era, most of the women had husbands who had taken ill, been injured at work or died leaving the ladies and their children in the distress that justified their visit (in retrospect one can see expanded welfare and ‘affirmative action’ being planted in this pattern: if we can awared it to them via the show, why not let “government award it” and “the rich” can sponsor it?). Last but not least, the lady whose narrative evoked the most applause-sympathy was seated on a simple throne and presented with a bouquet of roses by the show’s host, a fellow with slick hair and a pencil moustache. Her tears trickled down in gratitude for being chosen and the credits rolled to the crescendo of concluding applause. It was bread and roses too and still within the bounds of individual sympathy, corporate charity and female distress.  

Americans (and others) already are cheering at the polls and before the music dies the media will announce the new Queen for a four-year Day; perhaps they will play, “dog save the Queen” or some other pc doggerel to suit postmodern dogma.

Many will cheer the end of the dog-and-pony show, but this relief is not long-lasting. Two years ago we learned that the campaign has become as perennial as the elites are permanent. Barack who?  Bill who? The fellow who co-wrote Prairie Fire and Dreams from My Father? Who covers for him? Long live the Queen.

The perennial campaign and the endless seasonal sports cycles that overlap the seasons, knitting them into a seamless robe of consumerist distraction and anesthesia perfectly fit the goals of the social engineers in their attempt to deify the State “and to make it so mighty as to render it coincident with society (Fascism).” Among the methods to achieve this is to create “a secular religion,” for example via sports, including the political ‘horse-race,’ or a web of soap operas filled with the confessions and passions of virtual persons to generate “a permanent enthusiasm” accompanied by and helping to sell “decrees trying to enforce ‘virtues’[that are] high-sounding collectivist abstractions.” This leads to “a universal system” and “the conquest of the inner man” [3].

The Welfare State and its Fascist managers exploit Jean Jacques Rousseau’s notion that we are all one family, a global village linked primarily by feelings of innate compassion, that primitive man’s main feeling is empathy: civilization is the problem, nature the solution. Rousseau visited no primitive societies. But as his feelings evolved, Rousseau decided that the State would ensure that the General Will is fulfilled by policies increasingly presented as ‘therapeutic’ “decrees trying to enforce collectivist abstractions.” Psychology and its offshoot, modern education, both forms of social engineering, see and treat men and women “as imperfect machines” and view “society as a field of experimentation” where we can be ‘fixed’ or re-programmed [4]. This progressive replacement theology expresses itself in popular culture. The entire Age of Aquarius mystique, its manner of selling the sensate; its subordination of reason, memory, and traditional bonds to ‘authenticity’ often pre-cooked; the emergence of Rock ‘n Roll and its devolution to rap, gangsta and whatever the reigning noise now is called; the baring of the body in public; the slaughter of the unborn and newly born, the cult of “self-esteem,” for certain groups, the increasingly ‘hot’ focus on ever smaller bits of time is all part of the playing out of Romanticism, the new Gothic in which the element of terror is increasingly grotesque and pervasive, in which the new grail is the thrill of volatility, breaking norms and mechanized passion, sterile and cold. “The entire web of societal relationships becomes mechanized” in pursuit of “a unified society,” a machine that the engineers will build “to persuade and educate people in the new ways” [5].  Television and all mass media are part of building this machine of re-education, even shows that today seem as quaint as “Queen for a Day.”

The concept of “progress,” closely associated with Darwinism as a replacement for providence and with Nature displacing its Creator is also relevant in contemporary, junk-science descendants of “Queen for a Day” described below.

During this interminable campaign, a regular visitant on the O’Reilly weeknight variety hour is a “body language analyst” who, with her host examines video of a candidate or media celebrity and offers numbingly banal, pc interpretations of what the human under examination supposedly is feeling and what their personality must be like. Please note that this segment is not arbitrary, simply moronic or ‘funny’; it is menacing, it is prepping us for more clever ‘social scientists,’ who will analyze and “coordinate the personality” of growing numbers of people, perhaps as part of a means-based test for receiving governmental favors. For education in the view of educational engineers of a new world “is persuasion…to help students unlearn, to liberate them from traditional and outmoded folklore, beliefs and postulates” [6] so they can be re-programmed with passions and high-sounding collectivist abstractions, — lies, in simple language: “Islam is a religion of peace,” heterosexuality is rape; free public education is a right, There should be sex ed for kindergartners, or whatever.

But Bill’s not one to make mountains of molehills; he’s fair and balanced. For goodness sake, he visits “the View” and “Letterman.” To him, Rashid Khalidi is just “a Palestinian guy” (10-30-08) and he’s a nice guy, too. He reads the ratings-meter and eats well. His ratings are up as he often mentions.

The body language zombie has learned to allow her face some ‘human’ animation, at times. She herself would be a quaint subject for analysis. Perhaps some day all girls will grow up to be as wise and ‘normal’ as her, after proper engineering in public school where they learn how to “read” personality. Imagine having a person like her assess you at every airport, supermarket, and office scanner. One will need an access code, no? Her clones will confer or withhold them, God forbid.

What happens to the expression, and then the feelings of someone under such scrutiny? Dear reader, they become more uniform and repressed; the frightened human examines and fragments his every response. This in turn leads to a greater perceived need for ‘care-givers’ to “coordinate the personality” as Alice Bailey wrote (“Seed Groups in the New Age” 1937). Thus does expression become repression and the cult of authenticity, sensation and compassion leads to regimentation, fear, official cruelty and indifference; thus does Romanticism, winding through the era of industry and the social sciences (Modernism), become “technology” and thus postmodernism becomes the antithesis of Romanticism its great grandparent. Appetite, “the universal wolf” consumes itself via the lust for power which, as in Rousseau’s Social Contract or the Communist Manifesto purports to bring a secular utopia based on nature and the worship of nature, “an idyll, for all” [7]. An epitome of this dogma is “change you can believe in,” a slogan reflecting the deification of “progress,” that is, the eliciting and management of sensation (“let’s do it,” what? we’ll tell you, stay tuned), the method of the new totalitarianism. Instead of societies based on integral nations, communities, families and individuals the model is a global village in communion and directed by facilitating witch doctors.   

This is no hyperbole; like the oxymoronic “universal voluntary community service,” a civilian army “as extensive as the armed services,” “an idyll for all” means that everyone must be ‘inside the circle’ of official consensus or they do not exist. In the harmonics of the new socially engineered world, “everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue [or mind-numbing pop tunes hymned by hotties] and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless that need only be caught and crushed like a flea” [8]. 

Last spring, the body language, sensation-and-analysis routine budded to produce a new-old feature for Mr. O’s variety show. An eternally young pollster, Frank Luntz has been “wiring people for emotion” to gauge, via their pulse, their feelings about a candidate or his or her message. As in Queen for a Day there is a meter that shows, via colored lines, the pulse of registered Republicans or of Democrats quickening and slowing as the subjects watch and listen to footage of the politicians.

What if someone had a panic attack about the wires, or because Frank looks like Igor? Would that count as “approval”? 

There’s no applause, no roses, crown or scepter, yet (Family Law bestows those via emoluments called “alimony,” “child supports,” “the family residence” linked to numerous tax-funded “social programs” geared to women and “single moms” who may tip the vote to BHO), but winsome Frank never stops smiling and emoting with Bill about the ‘leanings’ or maybe one should say, tendencies of the crowd, or mob, or persons assembled in his peanut gallery.

From Buffalo Bob to Frankenluntz in five painful decades: what a ride. And William Ayers grew up to be “a respected Professor of Education” by the nature of the beast.

“They’re reacting on a second-by-second basis” Dr. Frank says excitedly. That’s science at work; what a great show! No wonder its grabbing market share, as Bill often relates.

Thus do human beings and citizens dwindle to emoting voters, stimulated pulses and a line on a meter: the new Minister of Psychology is a meter-reader who explains what makes us tick, and gets annoyed when we don’t tick as s/he believes we should. Perhaps in the next programming cycle s/he will wield a cattle-prod as her subjects ‘follow the bouncing ball.’ From Queen for a Day to wired Frank (a section of the entire polling phenomenon) one can follow the replacement of thinking by emoting managed by ’social science,’ another step toward “techniques of group-thinking and collective decision-making” facilitated by “community builders.” TV makes it ‘fun.’ The global mass communications system uniformly packages sensations into a blob of Culturetainment mystery meat for a starved village. This process of social engineering appears first in the most technically advanced societies, England, America, Germany and then rapidly and successfully spreads the attitudes, postures and even body language of the welfare state [9].  Societies like Russia that lack norms of accountability, where coercion is the norm play major roles in the process of forgetting, in the managed social lobotomy the servants of the barons term “progress.”

“You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then others write other books for it give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begin to forget what it is and what it was.” [10] 

The week of Mischief Night, Halloween, and Ballot Bowl, Frank was smilingly perturbed that the undecided voters viewed the entirety of candidate Obama’s vacuous infomercial and emerged alive and still undecided! He thought it was preposterous; he couldn’t understand it. “They got the idea [sic] that he [Obama] worries about them,” he said with his usual energy, “but they still wanted specifics!” This even though BHO had intoned platitudes such as, “when you make promises you should keep them”; “you earned your pension you should keep it,” (thanks) and said, in his suave swooning tones that “I’m worried about the single mom who…” proceeding to enumerate a list of social types about whom he said he was worried. The man has feelings, lots of feelings; he “worries” about all kinds of people; with his sound-byte cadences and relaxed gestures “he gets them nodding” in agreement, Luntz said of the subjects of his ‘wired-for–emotion’ experiment and yet, and yet still they say they’re undecided; 1/3 even switched to McCain! Carnk the generator, Igor…

His frustration and the failure of complete numbing control is a constant theme of literature that examines social engineering. In Brave New World, the top alphas that direct conditioning lament that there is something immaterial inside humans that causes them to make errors in their assigned roles and to feel a need for relief from their manufactured ‘happiness.’ So too, Luntz was distressed by those the messiah left undecided.

Not to miss a beat and as if some guiding hand was scripting a multi-channel, culture-wide total art work (gesamtkunstwerk) CNN had a prime time feature on “the undecided lobe” in which they showed a cross section of the brain and launched into babble about what part of it led people to stay in the muddled middle rather than become bobble-heads for Obama or bop to the GOP. Ten years from now you can tell your grandkids, if they’re not on TV that you were present at the launching of the physiology of the undecided program; perhaps it will become a “War on the Undecided Brain” akin to the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, or War on Global Warming, etc. There will be grants for sociologists to identify, psychologists to name syndromes and surgeons to fix the misfiring organ. Might that be a problem in an era of free universal health insurance funded by tax cuts for 95% of the people? Maybe it depends on what you mean by “people?”

Ever get the feeling that you’re being mobilized for some great quest for some great goal somewhere? The fainting communards at the messiah’s rallies get the drift. After all, General Colin Powell, a crossover consensus-type endorsed Obama saying “we need a transformational figure.” Clearly Obama is a bridge to the future, whatever it is; looks like a one-way toll road crammed with free college, health care, tax cuts, jobs, ethanol and change. But the piper will be paid; the Queen will be waiting: Applause! Off with their heads!

What if Frank’s response-a-meter was wired to the players in the H & C shout-fest that follows the variety hour? Would it remind body language experts of that New Age classic, “The Beast with Two Heads” starring Ray Milland and Rosie Greer? Does the finale of that film (loosely based on Frankenstein) with Rosie driving into the sunset singing ‘O Happy Day’ augur well for our approaching climax?  The latter is not likely to be comedic.

Like the theft by Prometheus of divine fire this gambit won’t end well; the attempt to fuse communism and capitalism, providence with programming is not synthesis but negation; not peace but war; not boundaries but an oceanic broth of emotion churned by ‘world servers’; not grace and beauty but horror, the key word of Frankenstein, of this election cycle and of the coy imperialism and intolerance of postmodernism, the cult of insincerity and the cynical imposition of theories veiling a lust for power and the crushing of all individualism and thinking but that of the elite.

Yes, “he gets them nodding.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.