April 2008 archive

If you did not catch the Colbert Report on Comedy Central last night (Thursday, April 17th), you will probably find it worth your while to catch one of the scheduled reruns today or this evening. The show brought to a climax Colbert’s week in Pennsylvania in advance of the primary election next Tuesday.

Last night’s show was political satire at its best, but it was also political allegory at its most profound.

Stephen Colbert showed why he deserved that Peabody Award.

Here is a link to last night’s show.

Here is a quick synopsis below the break.

Since returning from Boston, I have received every morning a harried phone call from Mom documenting my Grandmother’s decline. She has another infection, she has fallen, she has blacked out and isn’t certain what transpired. Each time the conversation ends, this morning I gave Mom some half assed advice that she treated like a sliver of brilliance because she too is stressed out, I think that there are countless other middle aged Americans getting these same phone calls. After all we are a nation of traveling and middle class aspiring wanderers and consumers dancing the ultimate unicorn shuffle thinking that we matter as individuals that we should be out achieving and growing and living in districts with good schools in suburbs with no trees or working OT to send the kiddies to private school and telling ourselves the money is worth it so somebody will recognize our offspring in their specialness and all of this is often done hours away from our parents who live in a small towns with no jobs/declining post industrial city with no jobs/NAFTAized regions with no jobs and the only people we know who stayed behind have no jobs or low paying jobs with no benefits who are dully caring for their parents while trying to talk their own kids out joining the service because their own options are limited. And really. They can go to college and become teachers and scientists and get plowed under by debt and live in a studio apartment after graduation with six other roommates because they pay more in rent than Mom and Dad do for the mortgage.

This is America. We have choices. We can just amble on down the road of personal responsibility and free market solutions and buy lottery tickets or hope to hit the big one at the local casino where everybody says: that buffet is really great. Really, I know somebody who won 80,000 or my neighbor’s cousin’s aunt does.

And each time I get the phone call I try to remember how much vacation time I have. Not much. Because I took a vacation this year. Stayed in America because Europe was too pricey and I am not keen on those charming third world countries where they put you on a compound to create the illusion of an  local economy. Then I berate myself for even taking a vacation, who can even afford to take one now? Who even gets paid vacation? That search is starting to take on Holy Grail like proportions for the average working American. Yeah. We will give you a job and the best that you can hope for is that we won’t humiliate you too too often and we will let you train your replacement. Deal?

My girlfriend who has been at her job in Canada two years gets twice as much paid vacation as I, at my job almost ten. But those Canadians pay high taxes. I hear they all want to come here but they won’t work cheap like those other immigrants…. you know the nice ones who enjoy and value hard work for slavery wages.

The Associated Press has more details about the protests in Tongren yesterday, including information on arrests and the use of force by Chinese police and paramilitary:

Monks on Thursday called for the release of fellow Buddhist clergy. They were joined by area residents at a local market, according to the center, which is based in the seat of the Tibetan governmment-in-exile in the Indian town of Dharmsala.

The center said police who were rushed to the scene began beating participants, despite efforts at mediation by a senior monk.

Receptionists reached by phone at Tongren hotels confirmed the protest, saying a crowd had gathered near the local county government offices. “Today there’s no more protests. Those people were all seized,” said one receptionist.

snip

The women refused to give their names for fear of retaliation by authorities, who have reportedly offered rewards for information on people leaking news of protests and crackdowns to the outside.

snip

A worker at a Tibetan restaurant in downtown Tongren near the monastery said police attacked protesters indiscriminately. “They were randomly beating people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Duoma.

link: http://ap.google.com/article/A…

The AP reports that the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy has put the number of people arrested at over 100.

Art Link Narrow Passage Pacifism All war does is spread more war Stopping the fighting by means of war someplace just encourages people to fight someplace else Except they have learned how to kill better –Robyn Elaine Serven –January 13, 2007

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique that comes in different sizes. This essay is about the Bush size Big Lie. I’ll get around to The Really Big Lie another time. The Bush Big Lie is just a distraction to keep people’s attention away from The Really Big Lie. But it’s big enough in its own right.

The Bush Big Lie is everything he’s done and said for the last seven plus years. The biggest part of his lie is the war in Iraq. It’s so obvious on the face of it that he lied us into the war, he lied us into escalating it and he’s lying us into staying there forever while he lies about the great progress we’re always making. The amazing thing about this is that over half of the American people actually know he’s been lying. But hey, what can one person do about it? A significant percentage of Uhmericans still believe that Saddam had WMDs; that he was complicit in 9/11; and that he gave shelter to al-Qaeda. We have some of the most unquestioning, incurious, gullible people on the planet. These Uhmericans think we’re doing the right thing and stopping the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

Bush is too dumb to have invented the Big Lie. A European guy came up with that concept in 1925:

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

Hitler blamed the Jews for being the Big Liars which was a bit of evil genius. He accused his victims of being the crime. Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels attributed the Big Lie to Churchill and the English leadership in 1941:

That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Hmmm. During the war – the Big One – our OSS, precursor to the CIA, came up with a psychological profile of Hitler. They derived yet another example of the Big Lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

I don’t know about the rest of the country but if someone handed me a sheet of paper that had the last blockquote written on it and asked me who I thought might have these qualities I’d have a ready answer. Actually, it would be three people: Cheney, Bush and Rove – the father, the son and the evil spirit of the Big Lie, Bush-sized.

And almost all of America is focussed on the Bush Big Lie while the pickpockets work the crowd. More later.

(All quotes from Wiki – Big Lie)

Shanti.