When it rains in your dream it is not exactly raining as rain does when it rains in a place in the world. Rain in a film has another meaning. Now dreams are not fantasies, although fantasies have been called waking dreams. As dreams are not literal; fantasies also have nothing to do with wishes, especially in the way wishes become something of desire when the wish is wished in earnest. What will be, will be? What we want and what we fantasize are not one and the same thing; I’ve known this since I cannot recall when I first became aware of the difference.
I do know that too much of print and broadcast media in America is meant to serve a propoganda function for the Power and Money Elites, particularly derivative of how tied the media elite are to both Power and Money in America; and this propaganda function is not an indication of the fakeness of news, but just the opposite. No well functioning propoganda organ of the State can be fake in the ways the media have been called fake by the imbecile in the Oval Office, which is something that most New Yorkers have known for decades . . . but this fake President has become a convenient straw dog for too many contemporary Democrats and other American liberals to deflect from the grotesque fact that they are either latent or closet conservatives.
Even someone whose book is as well written and articulate as Kakutani’s remains only a great source of neo-liberal propaganda in service of the former Status Quo, supporting the Power and Monied Elites in their efforts to continue the truly totalitarian re-structuring of American Bourgeois Capitalism. She is as dangerous as those she helps keeping the shadows, but one whose book should be on every shelf. It’s too easy–maybe even too effete–to use Orwell to critique old line totalitarianism, the formation and dissemination of propaganda by totalitarian regimes (like Bolshevik Russia/the Soviet Union or Nazis Germany, but not Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain [and for reasons I will iterate at another time, in another place, with other words . . .]), without turning the critique onto Western Democracies, as Orwell had.
But then, Kakutani’s focus on Trump and her far too sweeping over-generalized explication of how we have come to the period of Trump and his assault on Truth and what is true [both are not the same things], is an effort to reassert support for the closet conservtism of Bill, Hilary and Obama, the latter having more in common with Reagan than anyone will want to see . . . yes, Democrats are virtually all of them closet conservatives when they are not latent conservatives . . . so of course the Republicans were going to leap off of a cliff of Reactionary lunacy . . . unless the goal was for them both to meet in a blissful middle which for America will always be somewhere right of center?
Kaskutani could have turned her critique of the loss of Truth, the metaphysics and epistemology of Truth, onto the Democrats, or the Oligarchic rule of America by Monied elites become the Power Elite . . . but she did not. She turns again and again her focus on the historical facts, analyses and interpretations back onto explicating Trump, avoiding anything that might bespeak of trenchant observations about Democrats, about Hilary’s connections to wealth or her and Obama’s bitch status with Wall Street Pimps . . . and the top 0.1% of the income/wealth strata only control 20% of the Nation’s wealth. It is the next 9.9% who control in themselves, 60% of the nation’s wealth. So, then . . .
Of course, we can only imagine a controlled population in other societies, not in our own, no never in America–and no matter how vehemently we might persist in this belief, this leap-off-a-cliff of faith becomes yet another fact we add to the many facts we make, and we do make these things we call facts, facts and more facts. Of course, give us nothing but facts, just the facts every police in every police state want and want alone, just the facts, the unadulterated facts . . . the purity of something factory made . . . another received idea that becomes a current political dogma, one that, in its animation, has turned to bite US in the ass.
State control is elsewhere, State control cannot be here, in this Democratic America. Free and brave enough to move straight away into the abyss of State control . . . in Democracies, the People always vote for their loss of liberty. No consensus had ever been garnered in the Russia that became the Soviet Union because it was not the practice. The Nazis, on the other hand . . . theirs was a different maneuvering.
The carnivore’s teeth are embedded with the force of a wild beast’s jaws, a beast we cannot fathom because that bast is all too human when not being wholly Homo-Sapiens, not exactly the same things, the two of them being bitten straight through our collective anus. State administrators and politicians are preoccupied with your asshole, every one of them a closet proctologist inservice of the State when not just the government.
I am assuming that if we still can talk about the body politic when speaking about US (the U.S.) collectively socio-politically, then we can refer to the parts of that body as part of what we feel collectively, what we experience as a society, and that is what it might be that does affect US all. So then, right there in our socio-political shit-hole are the teeth of this dogma, again animated, our Political Anima or Animus, we could say, as all our beliefs have both the potential and a randomly measured actualization for the investment of spirit–some of us still speak of the Spirit of the times, the spirit of history, the spirit of the People?
Part of the media’s manipulation of democracy–and that would entail just how democracy is defined and articulated in/through/by various media, as well as handled by the government, understood and utilized by the People in their interpersonal endeavors, their endeavors with government and its bureaucracy–yes, part of all of these is the Hollywood-like expertise at presenting sets of images that amount to some meaning . . . yes, how the media use this Hollywood like precision and expertise to present a new fiction of democracy to the people who are by now full-fledged members of the Public is not what the Oval Office Imbecile means by calling all news Fake News . . .
Trump is actually combatting the idea that mainstream media, print, broadcast and even social, serve a propaganda function. They serve this function by helping to keep Power and Money in the shadows; and this has best been served by not lying all the time, by providing genuine journalism some of the time, and only partly lying enough of the time, when deflecting would ensure credibility and be less likely to be seen (that is understood for what it is . . .)––effective propaganda never lies all the time. Now Trump has us defending the media in its best efforts to keep Power and Money in the shadows. Lying all the time, a media that is Fake is not propaganda.
A propaganda function the media does serve, and it serves this best by not being fake.
Yes, the Public and the People are two quite distinct social entities; the People and the Public having a mutually exclusive relationship to the State. Now Media manipulation makes of our news anything but fake; propaganda, here and there, now and then, sometimes more overtly disseminated, other times, sprinkled like salt or pepper; however, moreover, none the less . . . our Media, particularly print and broadcast, serve a propaganda function for the Power Elites and the Monied Elites by speaking the truth beside the point . . . but then this should not be a surprise, or is it?
Centurions and Priests of the Temple participating in crucifying Freedom and Democracy. Hyperbole herein calculated. States have served only the public good; what is good for the Public though might not be good for the People. States want everyone to join in Public works. Yes, all for the Public Good–this is true, but never really the good of the People. From the time of Kennedy, the Oval Office has been quite adamant in sustaining the idea that we should not ask what our country can do for us because it no longer intends to maintain its responsibilities to the people. We should only ask what we can do for our country because a state serving people as a public goes much further in servicing the needs of the few, the needs of the elite while appearing to serve the public good, although less and less.
This is the given; it is not going to disappear, nor are states or governments or politicians ever going to relent, not without pressure from the People, We the People of the United States . . . a More Perfect Union . . . But with master demagogues from the Oval Office–and Trump is not a master demagogue–or is he? With these demagogues selling the idea that we should sacrifice, when bankers do not, that we should look to serve when those presumably elected to public service only serve the monied and power elites of our society and other societies before drawing on some semblance of responsibility to the People, we will lose whatever remains of Jefferson’s We the People, yes capital ‘P.’ Another kind of Master demagogue this Baron Von Trumpeter of his own horning in on the spoils of the Monied Elite whom he was never really a part of or a player among . . . he desperately wants to join.
The public, again, is the people in service of the state, a people who disinvest their weight as the people for the more state-buoyant public. The People are the only institution that could counter balance the weight of the state–that has that potential, but only if . . . if what? I ask, but I know and because I know I am suspect by even those who agree with my vision? my position? my arguments of and for the People? When that People we We are, who We need to be, who We need to remain becomes only a state serving public, our weight is thus added to the State against the People in counter leverage.
The management of numbers and how agents of the state imagine the numerals that are tossed about in discussions of state while managing the state . . . these may vary from age to age, from government body to government body, but numerical value you and I have always had, in fact, this is the only value you or I have ever had for any state, in the minds of those who service the state in the most functionary way–the functionaries, the bureaucrats. Yet, if you imagine that the neo-liberal globalizing serve-the-donor-class Democrats do not serve this end as much if not more often and actually more successfully than the neo-con reactionary Republicans then you are a BIG part of the problem the People have in trying to stave off becoming a State-serving Public 100% of the time.
A public before the people is always in the interests of the state. The state is not your friend or family, even then, it might not be the best for you. Cain was Abel’s brother, Absalom, David’s son, and so on, you understand what I mean. You are a numerical variable because you have always been one in the marketing of politics–not even politics itself. The marketplace of political need and demand are one thing; what we have is the marketing of candidates, the marketing of issues, the creation of issues by marketing. To repeat: the organic marketplace of the People’s needs is one thing, marketing issues and candidates and needs is quite another. Marketing is an artificial creation of market. Each of us becomes an enemy of the People the moment we abdicate our responsibility to We the People for what we might imagine is a more lucrative role as a State serving Public, at least in a situation where crumbs from the table of State are served to we the dogs of State. And we wonder why we have become so bitchy, men as well as women.
Most states are the mortal enemy of all that is good in the individual human soul (and yes, I have not allowed the non-locatableness of soul to cause me to disbelieve in it). No government management of the state is friendly to people. The people as an amalgamation of individuals is never in the state’s interest; the state sees best the management of the people in a manner best understood by cattle farmers. Yes, cattle farmers do not abuse their cattle, even when they are leading them to slaughter.
A population that can read is not a population that is easily controlled. States only ever want control. A population that reads and reads well, other than the organs of State Propaganda, as in most of our media too much of the time, cannot be easily transformed into a state guided and supported public. States are not interested in people, really; never have been. States form truth in a special tautology: the state is the state of the state for the state by the state to which the state stands will only ever withstand in itself the state. The Media in America is meant to keep Power in the shadows, primarily; secondarily its job is to disseminate information, that in itself all about keeping order.
What say You, if this were a short fictional diatribe against the Power and Monied Elites represented first and fore mostly and certainly lastly by one President after another and another and another until the last syllable of recorded democracy . . . while all our yesteryear liberties have gathered dust among the ruins of our freedom? No? Yes? Maybe? What next? Yet instead, an essay . . . to essay or not to essay would then be a question, if not the question. What then shall I say to you my hypocrite brothers and sisters? Readers we are not, no longer critically minded deeply enough to handle an adequate defense of democracy against those who would abuse it, those who would dismantle it, and those who would destroy the economic stability of too many Americans, too many in the name of the advance of new technologies, presumably intended to save us from ourselves, make our lives more connected, yet only to the sources of State control, all the while disconnecting us from ourselves and any others in a meaningful way, isolating each of us, turning each of us into a solipsist and an Idiot . .
The Falling Leaf Review 