Perceptions Managed
Everything happens for a reason.
It's funny, but I hear that all the time about my own personal situation, the disintegration of my big relationship, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess I seem to be in.
But when it comes to our country's situation, the disintegration of Iraq, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess of our "democracy"...I keep hearing that life is random, filled with mere coincidences and not a result of an agenda.
It's just incompetence.
Bullshit.
It is bullshit in my personal life, and it's bullshit writ large for the state of the world. I had my perceptions managed by my Ex. She got what she wanted and I embraced denial. She profited. Mightily.
So, now I am working on a story about the role of perception management in our government and their policies. How they sell occupation to the Iraqis with bogus news stories. That whole "soldiers writing news" thing that came and went about a week ago. Three companies are making $100 million each to sell this crap to the hapless, increasingly insurgent Iraq people.
I won't be able to go there, but this has been going on for fifty years. In Iran and Guatemala in the 1950's, domestically and internationally in the 1960s...curtailed by revelations of CIA hijinx in the 1970's, but reinstituted by a presidential directive in 1983. It lead to our mess in Central America and Iran-Contra. The news, my friends, is a code that has to be deciphered. It's filled planted news designed to sell us enemies, to gin up wars and, therefore, create new markets for military-industrial products.
We have the Lincoln Group doing it in Iraq. And we have the Rendon Group doing it here. They've been creating the perception of necessary wars since we invaded Panama. John Rendon recently bragged about it in Rolling Stone.
Folks, everything happens for a reason. Syriana tries to let us in on it a bit. Not as much as I'd like, but perhaps that's too much for our delicate stomachs. We have a hard truth to swallow. Our perceptions are being managed on a daily basis. It went into overdrive during the 2000 election recount, and it hasn't stopped. It's not that the information isn't out there. You just have to work to find it. Read multiple sources...news from outside the bubble. You have to trace the money and see who benefits from what. You need to think about motivations and holes in stories...and why those holes never get plugged.
The Pentagon is spying on us, they've spent $100s of millions to build the case for invading Iraq, for managing the news once we got there...and for placing stories throughout the media. Guys like Bob Woodward get access for a reason. No coincidence. It was no coincidence his book told all those Red State voters that W talked to God about invading Iraq and God said, "Don't worry...I'll sort 'em out later." That helped him with Evangelicals in the election. It scared Blue Staters...but Rove said, "Who cares...we ain't gonna win those states anyway." Woodward is no better than Judy Miller.
Judy Miller was working with John Rendon, by the way, helping to push faked intelligence as gospel to the New York Times. It was a PsyOp...a psychological warfare operation. Most of what we see as news is now a PsyOp. Read and read and read...study how the CIA conducted itself throughout the Cold War and you'll see the pattern, compile the evidence. Investigate Team B during the 70s and how they rewrote the intelligence estimate of the USSR. Overnight, it went from a collapsing power to a virulent menace on the march. George H.W. Bush was head of CIA and he put Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle on the case...the case for viewing the Soviets as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, a powerful enemy...a power that required a massive upsurge in military spending. CIA analysts disagreed, but the fix was in. They saw a waning threat, so they were left out of the process.
Good old Team B...sounds a bit familiar, eh? Perceptions were managed and it became the Reagan anti-communist agenda. But the USSR was dying...and Reagan's "victory" was going to come no matter what he did. That's why Congress asked in 1990 how the CIA failed to predict the fall of the USSR. Because they rewrote the intelligence! Rinse, repeat.
It happens over and over again. Embedded journalists, terrorism scares, anthrax attacks we can't figure out, a Bin Laden we can't find...and on and on. We are through the looking glass, people.
The real problem is denial...once again. I had to accept that I was in denial, that everything happened for a reason. So should we all. Let's stop clinging to fairy tales about democracy and incompetence and look at the course of events, the flow of money and who benefits from what's been going on.
Our perceptions can only be managed if we want to managed. Believe me, I know.
It's funny, but I hear that all the time about my own personal situation, the disintegration of my big relationship, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess I seem to be in.
But when it comes to our country's situation, the disintegration of Iraq, the deceptions and lies that lead to that...and the overall mess of our "democracy"...I keep hearing that life is random, filled with mere coincidences and not a result of an agenda.
It's just incompetence.
Bullshit.
It is bullshit in my personal life, and it's bullshit writ large for the state of the world. I had my perceptions managed by my Ex. She got what she wanted and I embraced denial. She profited. Mightily.
So, now I am working on a story about the role of perception management in our government and their policies. How they sell occupation to the Iraqis with bogus news stories. That whole "soldiers writing news" thing that came and went about a week ago. Three companies are making $100 million each to sell this crap to the hapless, increasingly insurgent Iraq people.
I won't be able to go there, but this has been going on for fifty years. In Iran and Guatemala in the 1950's, domestically and internationally in the 1960s...curtailed by revelations of CIA hijinx in the 1970's, but reinstituted by a presidential directive in 1983. It lead to our mess in Central America and Iran-Contra. The news, my friends, is a code that has to be deciphered. It's filled planted news designed to sell us enemies, to gin up wars and, therefore, create new markets for military-industrial products.
We have the Lincoln Group doing it in Iraq. And we have the Rendon Group doing it here. They've been creating the perception of necessary wars since we invaded Panama. John Rendon recently bragged about it in Rolling Stone.
Folks, everything happens for a reason. Syriana tries to let us in on it a bit. Not as much as I'd like, but perhaps that's too much for our delicate stomachs. We have a hard truth to swallow. Our perceptions are being managed on a daily basis. It went into overdrive during the 2000 election recount, and it hasn't stopped. It's not that the information isn't out there. You just have to work to find it. Read multiple sources...news from outside the bubble. You have to trace the money and see who benefits from what. You need to think about motivations and holes in stories...and why those holes never get plugged.
The Pentagon is spying on us, they've spent $100s of millions to build the case for invading Iraq, for managing the news once we got there...and for placing stories throughout the media. Guys like Bob Woodward get access for a reason. No coincidence. It was no coincidence his book told all those Red State voters that W talked to God about invading Iraq and God said, "Don't worry...I'll sort 'em out later." That helped him with Evangelicals in the election. It scared Blue Staters...but Rove said, "Who cares...we ain't gonna win those states anyway." Woodward is no better than Judy Miller.
Judy Miller was working with John Rendon, by the way, helping to push faked intelligence as gospel to the New York Times. It was a PsyOp...a psychological warfare operation. Most of what we see as news is now a PsyOp. Read and read and read...study how the CIA conducted itself throughout the Cold War and you'll see the pattern, compile the evidence. Investigate Team B during the 70s and how they rewrote the intelligence estimate of the USSR. Overnight, it went from a collapsing power to a virulent menace on the march. George H.W. Bush was head of CIA and he put Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle on the case...the case for viewing the Soviets as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, a powerful enemy...a power that required a massive upsurge in military spending. CIA analysts disagreed, but the fix was in. They saw a waning threat, so they were left out of the process.
Good old Team B...sounds a bit familiar, eh? Perceptions were managed and it became the Reagan anti-communist agenda. But the USSR was dying...and Reagan's "victory" was going to come no matter what he did. That's why Congress asked in 1990 how the CIA failed to predict the fall of the USSR. Because they rewrote the intelligence! Rinse, repeat.
It happens over and over again. Embedded journalists, terrorism scares, anthrax attacks we can't figure out, a Bin Laden we can't find...and on and on. We are through the looking glass, people.
The real problem is denial...once again. I had to accept that I was in denial, that everything happened for a reason. So should we all. Let's stop clinging to fairy tales about democracy and incompetence and look at the course of events, the flow of money and who benefits from what's been going on.
Our perceptions can only be managed if we want to managed. Believe me, I know.
posted by Josophist at 2:05 PM
6 Comments:
These are all distractions, news as 'entertainment' as it were. Kundera says that our lives are no longer private, but take place against a huge historical backdrop. The information age has stretched our perception of reality to unmanageable proportions. We have been taught that we are players in a global game. Our emotions and our moral sense are wrapped around the planet.
Thus we become inured to the desperateness of others' lives. To talk of the 'disintegration of Iraq' ignores the unimaginable terror of individual experience there. The danger is that we begin to view our own private experience with the same detachment that we view the lives of others. Impersonal analysis is substituted for the immediacy of experience and we become simply instances of generalities.
I appreciate the point. However, the geopolitical implications of the disintegration of Iraq and the individual suffering of those experiencing it firsthand are not mutually exclusive "realities."
This is my problem with Kundera and other post-modern existentialist rhetoricians...the idea of "realities." We are all players in the global game, like it or not. What we eat here affects others around the world. Monsanto is a great example of how the new globalization paradigm causes a great deal to happen to all of us. How it all flows from a central power source.
We must speak of the macrocosmic, and not to the exclusion of the microcosmic...and vice versa. Look, we've killed ten of thousands, we've posioned most of Iraq with depleted uranium..."WE"...not "they." I am an American, God forgive me, and I feel personally repsonsible for all that happens in my name. The reality must be exposed, for it is covered up by the a post-modern view that realities can be created and superimposed over truth. This is how the Bush Team works, this is the opening they exploit. They brag about creating new realities.
In fact, truth has been abolished in favor of power plays. As an academic historian, I've faced this over and over again. The White House fully embraces the post-modern way...that perception is king and truth is maleable.
Until I find a way to break the hold of perception over reality, I refuse to reside in some nihilistic, post-modern Platonic cave, watching the dancing shadows and claiming moral relativism as my savior.
There are a few of us out there...those who care about the irradiated, disfigured children being born everyday in southern Iraq and the geopolitical, socio-political machinations that make it so.
There is one large continuum called reality. Let's expose it.
but this does not make you any less of a consumer of 'bad news'. We lead digital lives. Our moral antennae are hooked up to the latest disclosures of the latest crisis. Iraq is the plat du jour, to be replaced shortly, within your lifetime, by another atrocity elsewhere. Vidal’s ‘United States of Amnesia’. Outrage lasts only until it is replaced by another crisis.
Kundera’s point is that these global events tell the story of our lives. We become conscious (and therefore powerful) by realizing the degree to which we are helpless. It can, you know, be ANY crisis, just as long as it impacts on us strongly enough to make us feel alive.
Truth has been abolished in favour of power plays, I agree. But the two ARE mutually exclusive. One cannot approach truth except through language, by which time the world has moved on. Language is always playing catch-up with reality (and not just in politics). Governments simply take advantage of the time-lag between action and cognition.
The media hype surrounding the latest political disclosure is not too dissimilar from the hype attending sports events. (Things must be exciting to catch our attention). Thus, we are spectators to the action and not personally responsible for it.
To feel personally responsible for everything your government does is a luxury few can afford. No citizenry recognizes their government as being representative or uncorrupt. No-one feels responsible for the actions of their government. On a public level, on a world level, this makes us all part of the same family.
Perhaps I'm a stranger in a strange land. I am still pissed off about the illegal arming of Iraq in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra Scandal, CIA human experimentation over the course of nearly three decades, the use of the War on Drugs to incarcerate Black men, the rise fo the Prison-Industrial Complex, Clinton's championing of the 1996 Telecommunications Deregulation Act, the Savings and Loan scandal..and on and on.
I am an historian by training...so I am interested in facts, documents, proof, money trails, paper trails. I believe that facts and truth are knowable. I do not skip lightly from one crisis to another, forgetting the last in favor of the next. Frankly, I think that mentality has more to do with the fallout of Kundera-like thinking, of post-modernism, post-structuralism, Derrida and the elevation of language as the arbiter of "truths." Kundera, according to you, cares only about his own actualization vis-a-vis the context of his experience. How selfish it is.
Aristotlean inquiry has been replaced by relativism. The news cycle and American amnesia are a direct consequence of the post-modern malaise that has become our popular culture. We care little about facts. And why should we...Stanley Fish has declared them to be meaningless.
Sorry, but "female circumcision," aka clitorectomy, is wrong no matter what you call, no matter the "cultural context." It is never right. Rape is never right. Post-modernism, with it's emphasis on on interpretations of realities, allows for those to be "different views." Look at our debate over torture. It has new, soft words like "stress position" to debase the truth that it is torture. It gets cycled through the same post-modern bullshit machine and because we have devalued values, we find ourseves divided on the issue of torture.
I spent my primary work on fascism trying to define the term...to get back to the original meaning of the word and stop the endless, post-modern debate about it. There is no widely accepted definition of fascism among historians. That is a total failure.
I see fascism, or neo-fascism, creeping up on us now and because the definition has been skewed and shredded, turned into a "set of realities," most cannot understand it in it's purest categorical terms.
The absurdity of all of this, though, doesn't mean that those of us who do care about the truth should stop hammering away. I will not stop. You could say that I am like Sartre in a Nazi Prison saying "I, Jean-Paul Sartre, am not in prison." Embracing my existential angst.
No. I live in an increasingly malicious nation driven by a power elite. They are crypto fascists at the very least. They inherited a long, growing tradition that has a strange relationship to one family--the Bush Family--and they are making a geopolitical play to create a new aristocracy. I will fight this process with facts...because we have documented evidence that those who are entrusted with telling us refuse to disemminate. Facts, if given a chance, can make a difference. People's perceptions are managed, and it's a science. Moral relativism among the Ivy League set has divriced them from there moral responsibilities...and they view Iraq casualties, American poor, Honduran childworkers as mere realities...modes of interpretation. Praise be to Globalism.
Finally...I am responsible. The corruption and lack of representation only heightens my responsibility.
Well, you're not as far as you might think from Kundera's own position.
You write: 'Our perceptions can only be managed if we want to managed. Believe me, I know.' This is certainly true. It places man at the centre of his world.
Kundera is neither selfish, nor nihilistic. He had his freedom and his country taken away from him. From his enforced confinement, he lacked the ease of research. In his writing, he has sought to re-establish 'man' at the centre of the human drama, rather than to be a victim of it.
When one comes face to face with a threat, one feels most alive. In the vagueness of our own lives, 'the threat' is certainly present, but it rarely comes into focus. We may use our freedom to seek out that which confines us and in so doing, regain a sense of our own individuality.
Nicely done! I admire your presistence. It is true that we relinquish our individuality in many different ways at many different times.
A nuance, however, is that Kundera and others in historical situations like his did not consent to the imposition of power in the way we in a "democracy" do. Frankly, I do not think this is a democracy, but like the transformation of Germany in the 1930s, we as a people are buying into a system out of fear and unreflective self-interest. In Iron Curtain Europe, we saw a small group of elites ignoring the consent-making process. It was true totalitarianism...whereas fascism is the outgrowth of pseudo-democratic consent-making...thus, perception management.
What pisses me off is that unlike Kundera, we have the information to expose much of what's occured over the last half century, but the packaging of globalization and the allure of cheap plastic shit dazzles the masses with the idea of a better life that hinges on moral relativism.
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