By Gary Steven Corseri

 “The soundtrack to daily life is a very specific tone of voice that is heard across all news outlets and entertainment channels. The voice of the generic talking head as he or she mouths platitudes and empty repetitive cliches….” –John Steppling

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] wish it were not so, but it was, and is, so,…and so it goes….

It is difficult to say when precisely it started, but because it was first recorded at a Commencement Ceremony at a very small and unimportant “Liberal Arts” college in the embarrassing “fly-over” part of the country, and somewhat deftly reported by a sophomore reporter for the college newspaper, it was at first entitled “The Commencement Phenomenon.” Later, in less polite society, owing to the slight spasm of embarrassed laughter that accompanied the eruption, some wag termed it, “The Gaseous Gyro.” Then, some group complained that this was no matter for “political correctness,” and another group complained about those complaints, and windows were about to be broken until the enterprising student-body president got up a petition entitled, “Let’s Just Call a Fart a Fart!” And then it was known as the “Farting Phenomenon,” and, for a time, “Mouth-Farting,” and it became a matter of common usage, as in: “Oh, that Republican,” or “that Democrat” or—fill in the blank—is just “mouth-farting again!” But, soon enough an enterprising New York Times reporter got hold of the story, and decided that “all the news that’s fit to print” required an escalation of language, and, since the visible and olfactory aspects always involved politicians, the odious and odorous ailment came to be known as “Politicianitis.”

After it was re-named such, the general public weighed in and assertions were tweeted and emoji’d proudly around that the earliest case had been observed (and whiffed) in Sheboygan, or Jersey City, or Los Angeles—or some such place noted for noxious gases or gasbag celebrity personalities. But no one ever offered tenable (more than vaporous) proof!

It happened this way: a politician would begin a speech with the usual spinning of words like drunken ballerinas—words accoutered in tutus and tights—and everything would go well (in terms of stupefying the audience, putting them to sleep, rousing them to violence, or whatever was the intention or inattention of the moment) and then, as the labored ending neared, there would be an unintentional fart! Right out of the politician’s mouth! Left or Right, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Libertarian, Fascist, Antifa, Black or White, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Easterner, Christian, Jew, Muslim, et. al.—it made no difference. As soon as he or she or Trans or Straight or LGBTQ or QTBGL began to say something political, there was a guttural rumbling and the air became fetid….

Investigations were demanded, and Mr. Ambiguity himself—former FBI director Comey--came out of his self-absorbed retirement to see what role the Russians were playing. Intermittently—like, every few hours—the public was assured that “The Investigation” was going well, results were imminently forthcoming, but there were always “unforeseen circumstances,”—lost emails, hurricanes, Global Warming, and a slew of events “beyond our poor powers to add or detract” (as Lincoln had said.)

The public might have learned to put up with these “anomalies”—they had already suffered much at the hands of lying politicians, and only half of “we the people” bothered to trot out to vote in the greatest Empire the world had yet imagined—but, sadly, inevitably, the contagion spread.

Fans of the Fox channel tried to ignore the reality when one of the attractive ladies on the thigh-high set let go with one of those “slight paroxysms of embarrassed laughter,” and her cohorts discreetly moved down the couch. When one of the white-bearded “elder statesmen” at CNN evinced the same paroxysm in the midst of a vis a vis interview—with a general, no less!—the public understood the full dimensions of the problem.

But, things only got worse!

University students began to complain that their classes were impossible to sit through. How could they possibly learn about Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Bakunin when their professors were stomping about in mad efforts to diffuse the evidence of their transgressions, transmissions and emissions?

But, things got worse again!

Sports had long replaced Religion as the digestible “faith” of the declared and decreed “Republic.” Sports was where the herd went to forget their subjugation—the whirring knives of Time inexorably approaching. Sports was vicariousness raised to the nth degree—a quasi-mystical land of super-heroes and buxom cheerleaders; or, in the admittedly pseudo-world of wrestling--freakish good guys and villains, and spilling-over mamary glands parading about the ring.

But now it was all changed. For, with every tackle, with every toss on the mat, there was grunting, and with grunting came the paroxysms and soon the stadium or the arena was evacuated because of the “fire hazard” caused by the surfeit of gas.

From politicians to media, to academicians to sports figures and figurines, the phenomenon spread from group to group, and then, to the general public. And it was clear that there was a pandemic—comparable, some wrote, (but would not say!) to the Plague of the Middle Ages. But others demurred and wrote, “No, it is much worse!”

“When can we hold our true love in our arms again?” the poets wondered, “and whisper tenderly to him/her/it, ‘I love you,” and kiss him/her/it--without encountering a ghastly, but understandable, expression of reproach and rebuff?”

And so, speech died. The “citizens” of the “Greatest Country that ever was” retreated to their “devices.” Robotics stocks soared. “A.I. is better than H.I.” became the catch-phrase of the era. And, soon enough, people forgot the spontaneous sound of the spoken word or the sung word, and nobody dared to remember…. 

I just finished reading what may be the single best takedown of the US establishment’s Russia narrative that anyone has published so far. In an article titled “Russia-gate’s Shaky Foundation”, Consortium News’ Daniel Herman meticulously goes over many of the major glaring plot holes in the official story about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election after reminding us of America’s extensive and well-documented history of using lies, false flags and propaganda to manufacture public support for war.

It’s a very thorough beatdown on the way the American people are being asked to swallow a collection of extremely grave charges with unfathomably dangerous implications about being “at war” with the planet’s only other nuclear weapons superpower based on amazingly flimsy evidence provided by known liars and manipulators. I highly recommend reading it and sharing it widely, even though the response from many Americans will be to put their fingers in their ears and hum the latest Pepsi jingle to escape the cognitive discomfort of realizing they’ve been completely wrong about everything and having their entire worldview ripped to shreds.

Russiagate is bullshit. We’re seeing nothing other than the boring repetition of the same tired old patterns we’ve been seeing from the American war machine for the entirety of living memory, repackaged in a shiny new 2010s wrapper with pictures of hackers and Twitter bots on it. The US power establishment is working to manufacture support for escalations with Russia for the same exact reason it has worked to manufacture support for escalations with all the other governments that it has bullied into submission over the years: to prevent the rise of any global power that could weaken the hegemony of the US plutocracy.

This is why America acts so goddamn crazy all the time, and it’s also one of the major obstacles to getting any kind of robust peace movement up and running in the US. The fact of the matter is that America is conducting a nonstop campaign to destabilize, manipulate, bully and control other nations to prevent the rise of a new rival superpower, and many Americans would rather it keep doing so. I can’t tell you how many Americans I’ve encountered while sharing my anti-war message who have said “Yeah, I agree war is bad and we’ve done some awful shit… but if the world is going to have a top dog controlling its affairs, I’d rather it be America.”

That’s it. Right there. That tells the entire story of public support for the US war machine in a nutshell. The crux of the issue is that you cannot want America to remain the world’s only powerful force and also be anti-war at the same time. These are necessarily two mutually exclusive ideals. One of the crucial ways that America remains on top is by keeping potential rivals off-balance using endless war in key strategic locations — if you stop the US war machine from doing this, you cripple America’s ability to ensure that it remains the world’s only superpower.

No anti-war philosophy is complete unless it directly addresses this fundamental reality. If you want America to remain the world’s leader while also wanting America to stop waging endless wars based on lies, you’re not anti-war, you’re a vapid, cutesy vanity politics airhead sharing social media-friendly bumper sticker ideals with nothing behind them. You don’t want the killing to stop, you just want to look like someone who wants the killing to stop.

The fact that US warmongering plays an essential role in maintaining its status as the world’s only superpower is not a secret, by the way. Washington’s neoconservatives, whose bloodthirsty policies have been consistently snaking their way into the mainstream platforms of both parties for decades, are completely transparent about this. The extremely influential neocon think tank Project for a New American Century’s most well-known publication, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century”, argues extensively that America’s victory in the Cold War against its only rival superpower means the US must step into a planetary leadership role and maintain that leadership role by any means necessary, including military force.

“As the 20th century draws to a close,” PNAC’s Statement of Principles reads, “the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”

The answer to this question came after 9/11: yes, yes it does. The New American Century has seen an immense increase in military interventionism across the globe to ensure the hegemony of the US dollar and prevent Russia and China from climbing the global power ladder unchecked.

 

When I used to play with elephants, I mistakenly prided myself on being a member of the most dangerous profession. In fact, the professionals under the greatest possible threat (99% chance of job loss, sidelining, intrusive surveillance, incarceration, character assassination, or murder) are either (i) influential humanitarians like Marley, King, Einstein, Ghandi, and Lennon (shown above), or (ii) hapless bystanders who know too much or unintentionally thwart the Controllers’ designs.

My Dark, Secret Fantasy: A Robust Anti-War Movement In America
Can I share a very intimate, private fantasy of mine with you, dear reader? I want to see a large, ideology-spanning…medium.com

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o the question being asked of all peace-loving Americans, really, is this: are you courageous enough to relinquish your attachment to the neoconservative notion that America should be the world’s only superpower? Are you truly anti-war, or are you a neocon with a ‘Coexist’ bumper sticker?

Noam Chomsky recently said that America “has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.” Indeed, America’s borders are easily-defended and remote from areas of potential conflict, which was why the country was able to surge ahead in the world after World War 2 while everyone else was rebuilding their industrial infrastructure from the rubble. It’s also why an extremely powerful billionaire class has set up its home base there; the plutocracy’s investments are well-protected in an easily-defended nation.

America is the safest country in the world and the most frightened country in the world, but if its people truly want to stop the wars they’re going to have to find some courage. America can maintain a strong military to defend itself without being spread out over hundreds of military bases throughout the globe and engaging in endless acts of military interventionism to keep other countries down. If it can build a real economy that isn’t propped up at the barrel of a gun it can even remain a major force in the world. But the fear of another country becoming powerful elsewhere on the planet will need to be relinquished before wars can come to an end.

The reason the US power establishment works so hard to manufacture public support for its wars is that it needs that support. The public can make things very, very difficult for the war machine if it stops listening to the propaganda lullabies and decides enough is enough. But that can’t happen as long as the American people are living in fear of the rest of the world. If you want peace, at some point you’re going to have to get okay with letting the world manage its own affairs. There will be no significant peace movement in America until this happens.

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But it is those who proclaim their patriotism the loudest that like to shout that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, and in fact the greatest in history.

In the opening pages of his Symbolic Uses of Politics, sociologist Murray Edelman writes, “Political forms thus come to symbolize what large masses of men need to believe about the state to reassure themselves.” Edelman argues that political forms and the symbols that represent them are infused with different meanings by different observers, and those meanings often disguise “…wide gulfs between our solemnly taught, common sense assumptions about what political institutions do and what they actually do.” These political symbols thus sustain people in their belief systems, shielding us from more tenebrous truths we’d rather not face.

Burns & Co prove that self-righteous imperial propaganda kills. But of course, they will never se it that way. Their paychecks depend on not seeing the obvious truth.

Ken Burns justifying his documentary on friendly venue, Face the Nation.

APPENDIX
Ken Burns on CBS's Face the Nation. No comment needed.