(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Why? What nobody wants to talk about. What next? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-11-09 Why? I listen to the coverage and the answers seem to me avoided, at best, briefly referred to before changing the subject. I should know better, but I am still amazed that comments by pundits, analysts and people with positions in the Democratic Party ignore or come from people who cannot see a main reason why we lost, a very big condition that has skewed the entire political spectrum across the United States. Hiding in plain sight, literally the size of America. It stares at us from red color coded areas on election maps, but now isn’t limited to the original rural red. This election shows that it has metastasized way beyond that. Actually, I am a bit angry. We The People should have seen this coming. It is like standing on a very straight railroad track out in the desert Southwest and seeing a train coming from a horizon perhaps 20 miles away, watching as it slowly grows larger and then being surprised when it hits you. I read lots of comments, I see that there is a lack of recognition, perhaps denial about the big picture view of what is happening to us in this time. Maybe everybody who is part of the larger Democratic culture did not study journalism or if they did, have not been interested in how PR has shaped journalism as well as American culture. The problem is that any progress towards a better future at this point depends on drilling into deeper thinking, getting in the game and excelling at it. At a minimum we have to quit falling for the temptation to wear brand name blinders. Effectively, the billionaire class has created, over about the last five or six decades, an alternative media system that has generated an alternative view of reality for a chunk of America, beginning with rural areas. Red States happen to be a visible result showing on the map. The brain space we live in as a society, our mental environment, has become polluted by normalized, organized mendacity. Lying, spinning, shaping, skewing, shading, fabricating, twisting, distorting, projecting and just plain making shit up for people to repeat to other people. Innovations in the art of lying and negating truth. Has anybody driven across large rural areas or lived out in remote small towns? Then you have tuned the radio dial for anything to listen to. You may not find anything but right wing talk radio. I listened to the first right wing radio broadcast out of Texas in 1968, when I was in high school. Life Line with Melvin Munn was sponsored by HL Hunt, the Texas oil billionaire. AM radio has a very large broadcast footprint. FM is smaller. Thus, NPR is mainly heard near college and university towns. AM out on farms, out in the vast western landscape, in trucks moving along interstates and around oil wells or construction sites. Hundreds of small town newspapers, which used to be the main source of news, have been bought out since the sixties by corporate players. For news, in many small towns across this country you now have to depend on right wing talk radio or Fox News, which was set up to be a wall to wall alternative reality, not just some different news stories. Where did this trend originally come from? Advertising and PR in the modern era, arose post WWII to convert the entire economy from a wartime footing to a consumer based one. The vision to use TV and radio and print to move the American psyche provided a basis for special interest players to produce a counter to the progressivism of the 60s. Edward Bernays, who emigrated to America in the 4Os to get away from the Nazis is considered to be the founding father of Madison Avenue. He was a German whose uncle was none other than Sigmund Freud. He set sail for New York with the idea in mind of using what he had learned from the founder of the science of psychology and his associates like Karl Jung, to get rich. In the book, Bitter Fruit, we see him in a consulting role in the 40s into the 50s, with United Fruit Company in its struggle with Mayan peasants in Guatemala. The company had taken land for large agribusiness tracts on which to grow Chiquita brand bananas for US grocery stores. Bernays had the inspiration to write letters to everyone who had a position of influence in US politics or the private sector and sell the idea that the indigenous people were communists, directed by Moscow to gain a foothold just south of the US border. In the absence of any idea about what was really going on to our south, this latter day meme became unquestioned and broadly accepted as the basic truth. This actually led to the 1953 overthrow of the President of Guatemala by the CIA, accomplished through a fake coup produced as a radio show and broadcast into the Presidential palace, causing him to flee. This is a model from long ago for using media to manipulate the public through psychological tactics or psy ops, which is employed on a larger and more sophisticated scale today. Not just passive story telling, but active manipulation. More recently than Bernay’s time, the Civil Rights reforms of the sixties that dismantled Jim Crow in the South, along with the other social reforms of that time, inspired a backlash that has been in progress ever since, growing through the past 50 or so years. Together with the most credulous cohort of Americans, evangelicals, an effort was mounted to change America. It happens that I went to college in the early seventies with a cohort of students from across the South, whose families were gobsmacked by the loss of the old order based on keeping blacks down. LBJ had not just signed Civil Rights and Voting Rights into law, he had sent Justice Department lawyers into local courthouses to file lawsuits against the local officials who broke the new civil rights laws. In the early seventies, these kids were beginning to search for a way to get back at American society for doing this. Bible study groups took on the flavor of political meetings, as I recollect the dorm room discussions that followed them. “America is on the wrong track, changing away from the natural order of things, brought about by the siren song of Liberalism and Hollywood.” The cure was to take a pledge, along with the commitment to be born again, to commit one’s life to get America back on the right track. A line of discussion I remember because it was striking as college kid bullshit, was that Christians getting up in public to run for office, had no hope of winning votes if they were going to say what they really believed, so they would have to lie. Since bearing false witness was a sin, they needed a way to resolve the contradiction. I don’t know who originated this one, but it was genius! To those who really believed, and who were among those who were Righteous, the ends justified the means, which freed them up to lie and mislead the public. It also created a coded way of speaking, Just a few years later, these kids started inheriting oil fortunes and running for public office. The stress on lying struck me as it has through the years. The ethic turns on its head the principle of academic and scientific truth seeking. It has created an important departure in politics. As Karl Rove once put it, “there is no such thing as truth, only a strategic use of words.” Now, the internet has served to be useful in stoking lowest common denominator resentments and hatreds, spreading debunked misinformation and falsehoods and insisting on made up facts that sound good so they get believed. This environment of polluted intellect has metastasized out of being strictly a fed state phenomenon. Our response needs to be to see this for what it is and learn how to ramp up to a next level of ability to relate to facts and engage in various forms of debate, We need a renewed educational system that can help people better grapple with the distinctions between manipulation for profit and real information in the public interest. Instead we may be about to enter a dark period in which truth telling actually gets punished. It may be very hard for people to tell the difference. We may see a further degradation of the educational system, especially if it is cloaked in the guise of religious objections to science or the pursuit of objective truth. We need real deliberation and deep thinking about how we can evolve as an enlightened public. Otherwise we will wind up as a chapter in a cautionary tale be Orwell. How come you have not heard about this? Where would you read about it? What person with a microphone would have been watching this? Media people don’t generally live out in rural areas or small towns. There is no money in it. I am working on my own experience as I have observed it. and hope to get a manuscript out. I thought that this story would have caused a lot of competing manuscripts. But perhaps now is the time to get this observation out there. The publishing industry is part of the media — that also has an influence from special interests. Every year at election time, Democrats do the same thing. We look to databases like VoteBuilder, to sort out base voters and maybe low propensity voters to go contact. This works as a strategy, with 40 years of development behind it, because it reliably moves a percent or two of friendly voters to the polls to add the hopefully winning margin. I have had a problem with this for some years. It is difficult to get anyone interested in any new ideas about other strategies. I have pointed out the strategy employed by the far right ever since I saw it coming in the seventies and eighties. I think it is hard for most people to think strategically, as if they had millions of dollars and could employ whole staffs of people in ongoing career positions. I had a friend who was a really fine journalist but who had to go to work in the PR industry instead. It happened that in 2016, I was describing what think tanks do to skew news coverage by hiring people at a good salary rate to work on showering local news editors with taking points disguised as content. He felt I was talking about him personally, so he informed me that he had to find a way to support his family now and was unfriending and blocking me. I was trying to find his phone number so I could reconcile with him when I heard he had died a few years later. That theme, talented people who can write really well and lend their energies to progressive causes, but who wind up starving and losing out to people who can make lots of money by selling out, is an underlying dynamic in our politics and our economy. It is money that makes the world go round after all. For many people, there is no other issue. But for a better future with government policies and better people in responsible positions, we need principled and broad minded people not primarily driven by money. That is a contradiction at the heart of our whole planetary civilization. It is the source of our unsustainably, which is causing climate change. We can talk about temperatures rising because we can measure that. We cannot measure human drives like the need to start and support a family. We can’t measure heart break. That is more important most of the time than the fate of the globe to us as individuals. A strategy we need is one that gets at the deeper stuff. The truth is that politics has a tendency to be about tangible and easy to talk about issues. The big picture stuff, the really important and paradigmatic stuff are too big. Or maybe, our politics is too small. We need to look to what is really going on in our world, some of which is about how we as a society can communicate as a population of 330 million people and where there are players who can manipulate people the way marketers used to sell us Frosted Flakes are GREEAAT! See the USA in your Chevrolet! You deserve a break today! Without billions, isn’t the only option to just ignore this? What can we do? We can’t minimize this. I laid this out over the phone a few years ago for a young man who had just been elected as Vice President of my local LD Democratic group. “So this is about messaging?” He said. This set of observations describing why we lost this election describes the slow advance of oligarchy that could be as implacable as a tide coming in. We can’t be complacent. Is it too late? We are talking about a great tide of history, but this is about citizenship in the human race, which we are part of. The whole development of education as the way to achieve progress for mankind is on the line. But the barbarians cannot burn the Library of Alexandria and kill Hypatia and usher in a Dark Age this time. Not if we each do what we can. See honestly and clearly. Think with as much penetrating clarity as possible. Develop the habit of being honest. Yes, it may hurt at times. Those who prefer to survive by being honest and not sold out to money may find lovers and friends, business associates or other people in your life instinctively shrink away. The money is extremely tempting when self interest is the value. Be articulate and practice writing in order to find ways to break through and persuade. That will not be easy because people may not want to believe what is happening or the scale of it and may not want to hear it. Have courage. Find other people who see, who are honest and who have courage. Try to be, in some form or fashion, a grass roots think tank. Try to figure out ways forward, whether locally or wherever you can. Use the internet or whatever means you might innovate. The Dark Ages ended with persistent efforts to pursue knowledge and enlightenment. This was something like 1,000 years ago. We now commemorate this with caps and gowns at every graduation. We have created library systems with no center that can be sacked and burned. Celebrate our instinct for struggling upward against massive odds even if it takes generations. Let the internet become a worldwide deliberation by the distributed intelligence of the human species. Think globally and act locally. Look to school board elections and city councils. Help the homeless. What they suffer from is the advance of oligarchy. Take it bloody seriously. This is a message in a bottle. I hope it connects with somebody, somewhere. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/9/2284838/-Why-What-nobody-wants-to-talk-about-What-next?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/