How we each remarkably think for ourselves and think alike

This could end up being a very bad post. If you are not reading it, it is because I thought twice and took it down.

There’s a phrase for people like me – many, actually, but the one most often used is conspiracy theorist. There is truth in it – I look around me and see random events like earthquakes and crazy governors like the guy who hit the Appalachian trail that ended in an Argentine valley, and understand that it is random. I see smart and dynamic personalities that cannot be constrained or contained … people like Bryan Schweitzer and Arnold Schwarzenegger are simply destined for high achievement. And then there is stupidity, so much a part of us that it is manifested in every walk of life and every philosophy, from Tom Cruise’s Scientology to Sarah Palin and the Teabaggers.

That is all the natural flow of life, but as I look at it all I sense there is more to it than just random events and bright and stupid people. There is a functioning and powerful intelligence at work as well, kind of a back light to all that we see.

Maybe that is crazy talk, but suppose that we had a mass media owned by wealthy private investors, a powerful weapon in the hands of a few. Given such power, would the collective impulse of those self-interested investors be not to use it? Would they simply step back not choose not to influence events to their own favor?

What we call “NBC”, for example, is people like Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, the parent company and a major weapons contractor. NBC was therefore invested in war, and benefited each time our country entered one.

Jack Welch is but one man, but at one time had considerable influence over the behavior of the news anchors and reporters and photographers who were the face of that network. When our country went into any of its many wars, NBC cheered our country on.

He’s just one example – Roger Ailes another, and Sumner Redstone another.

It’s hard not to be reductionist, as the media is large, and my mind small, so let’s be more general, and say that there are possibly a thousand people who have enough influence over major media outlets to dictate to us what is considered important and what is not. These people are wide and varied, but share one common trait: They are wealthy. They have an interest in preservation of the wealth machine. They feed us a constant stream of words and images, and in so doing exhibit heavy influence over our private thoughts and opinions.

Perhaps the media merely reflects popular opinion, and does not attempt to influence it. That’s possible – it is entirely possible that these thousand people who have this awesome power over us have opted not to use it. But unlikely.

So I point to two phenomena, each treated differently. The first is Sarah Palin. There is no better word for her than “stupid” – she’s classic beauty-queen/cheerleader stock, uneducated, unable to think properly, conditioned to make her way in life by use of her looks and charm. There’s nothing to her beyond surface features. She’s common enough that we all know people like her – shallow but influential just because men imagine themselves riding her bones, while women wish they were as desirable as her. She has power, but it is the kind of power that only works in small circles. Women like her, ‘trophies’, generally marry powerful men and live well, but on their own don’t offer up intellectual force or strategy to make business or politics. Often enough, they outlive their men, and become forceful actors on their own, destructive and crazy. Think … Marge Schott,

Here’s the other phenomenon: Howard Dean. He’s a smart man, a doctor, former governor, intelligent strategist who ran a groundbreaking campaign using the Internet for fund raising, thereby avoiding the corporate bundlers. He made his way in politics by shrewdness and calculation, and furthermore seemed driven by ideological impulses of a progressive nature.

Dean was a formidable candidate for president in 2004, and the media destroyed him. They took a speech he gave to exhort his campaign workers to keep on working, typical fare, and magnified it, repeated it and hounded us with it. They used it to destroy him. It appeared to be a conscious effort dictated by that backlight that this ‘conspiracy theorist’ sees as conscious manipulation of public opinion by media corporations.

Contrary to popular illusion, the vast majority of us don’t form our opinions based on reasoning, but rather by means of the food chain. Each of us looks above us to formulate an appropriate opinion about serious events. If all of the talking heads and serious people thought that Howard Dean had committed a “gaffe”, had done something terribly wrong, then Howard Dean must not be credible. Proper thinking people came to that conclusion all by themselves, and Dean had to quit his campaign. He was destroyed.

I see an overarching intelligence at work there. A decision was made high up the command structure of the news media, and the eerie part is that it was carried out not by one news outlet, but by all of them, as if they were lemmings with but one CEO. The on-air faces we see are mostly friendly idiots reading teleprompters, but the people who sign their paychecks are not. As Spock would say … “fascinating!”

And my question then is this: Why does that same intelligent force not destroy Sarah Palin? It could be done this afternoon, what with her incoherent babble, illegitimate offspring, flimsy education and inability to even read newspapers. Most recently she was caught by our real news media, the comedy shows, referring to the palm of her hand for crib notes in a friendly interview. That could easily destroy any other politician if given proper attention.

Howards Dean’s “I have a scream” speech could have passed without notice, but a decision was made to use that speech to destroy him. No such decision has been made about Sarah Palin.

Why?