I have long enjoyed Jon Stewart but not taken him seriously. He is a court jester – such people are important in oppressive environments. They serve as a tension relief valve and foster the illusion of free exchange of ideas.

Stewart has always stayed in bounds, pushing the line, but only so far, never really hitting home with a point. He once took it the point of absurdity. He organized the “Rally to Restore Sanity”, a go-nowhere event with no forward motion, no insight, no ground-level organization or purpose. It was just a rock concert for half-baked ideas.

But what the hell – he’s a comedian. In our country, he’s doing more journalism than our journalists can muster. So I have watched him over the years, and will miss his presence on the air.

And I watched last night as he interviewed CIA mole journalist Judith Miller.

Miller was on the front page of the New York Times during the propaganda run-up to the attack on Iraq in March of 2003. Her stories were littered with lies and agitprop. It’s common behavior for people of her ilk and the Times and other major media outlets. When the military-industrial-intelligence complex wants a war, the media falls in line. (To this day, the New York Times has not admitted that the Gulf of Tonkin was a false-flag attack. You’d think that after 51 years they could let a little honest reporting slip through, but no.)

Last night Stewart was confrontational and well-prepared. He had read both her NYT writings and her new book. He did not let her slip off the hook. He did not allow her to insult his intelligence*. He tried to paint a big picture of an administration that was intent on making a war on an innocent country against her bullshit fear-mongering techniques. He held up a photo of a New York Times front page that had Miller’s article opposite a 9/11 tribute.

Maybe he’s feeling freedom, since he’s leaving soon. He cannot be fired. Whatever it is, my hat is off to him. That was a courageous performance.
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*Said Miller, “The intelligence sources we were talking to had never really been wrong before.”

I’ve been trying to come up with a metaphor for Life in These United States, but am not creative enough to do it really well. The TV series Mad Men’s lead character, Don Draper, was raised in a whore house and is running from his true identity. The series is built around the advertising business, and this makes me wonder just how good this Mathew Weiner, the creator of the series, might be. He seems to be a conscious smuggler.

My search for a metaphor circles around the question “just how big is this thing anyway?” Way back when, watching the movie JFK in the early 90’s, Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison hits hard on two words – fascism, and coup d’état. What happened on 11/22/63 was a military takeover of our government. But the words did not sink in.

My best effort at a metaphor follows. Please supply a better one if you got it, pronto.

Imagine you are walking along one day, and trip and fall on a small hole in the ground. You pick yourself up and move on, but later go back and take a closer look. The small hole that you stumbled up is very deep, so deep, in fact, that you cannot see the bottom. You keep going back, as curiosity drives you, till eventually you put your whole body in, and look around and learn that not only is the hole very big, but that there is a whole city functioning down below us, hidden just below the surface of the ground.

I keep stumbling on things, and these are only a few ‘things:’

• Anthony Weiner was scandalized out of office after raising a ruckus over health effects of 9/11.
• Charlie Sheen doubted the official 9/11 story on a TV show, and lost his job on his hit TV series. Later he woke up in a hotel closet alongside a hooker, covered in cocaine.
• Wendy Burlingame, daughter of the pilot of the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon, died in a fire, trapped in an apartment.

But it did not start with 9/11.

• Dorothy Kilgallen, TV personality and journalist, interviewed Jack Ruby and swore publicly she would blow the lid off the JFK conspiracy. Drug overdose.
• Freddy Prinze was a popular star in the 1970’s, and wanted to do a Hollywood benefit to raise public awareness about the JFK murder. Suicide.
• Bill Hicks was an up-and-coming comic who used to make fun of the Warren Commission and offical truth in his act. Galloping cancer, age 32.

Those damned independent thought alarms. We’re taught to ignore them.

I’m slowly reading the book Votescam, written in the early 1990’s, about Florida elections in the early 1970’s, specifically Dade County, where Janet Reno was the State Attorney. The Collier brothers, Ken and Jim, stumbled on an oddity, that local TV stations in Florida “called” all of the elections when all they had in their possession was a readout from one voting machine.

They are persistent. I am at a point now they have learned that in “training” election volunteers, officials got their signatures and later used them to “certify” results without volunteer knowledge. The boys have assembled an impressive pile of evidence, and are taking it to major newspapers and the FBI. That’s a huge mistake, but they are not yet deep enough in the hole to see that. They find that the FBI is indifferent. The media is actually hostile.

The book opened with an odd passage that caught my eye:

This book also contends that the theft of your vote, or Votescam, is part of a supposedly patriotic “collaboration” between federal officials and the news media that began shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, when “responsible” American press was persuaded by American intelligence services to hide from the American people the actual implications of the Kennedy murder.”

Implications of the Kennedy assassination? The two words from that movie come to mind.

It’s not a few. I have seen hundreds of suspicious deaths, and a news media that is either forcefully silenced or peopled by automatons. I see people who use their minds properly silenced by intense ridicule by their peers. I see people with deadened brains imagining that lack of curiosity is a smart thing about them.

I know the power of suggestion. I know the power of group think.

Anyway, Happy Monday to you too.

We spent time in Nepal in 2013, right in that area that is close to the epicenter of the earthquake. That is no big deal, of course. Right now, with disaster in chaos everywhere, there are 300,000 tourists there. That we were in a place that is now in a disaster … it just brings it closer to our hearts.

We tried to contact our guides, Pramod and Demar, but of course there is no electricity. Both live in Kathmandu, but odds are this time of year they are out doing their jobs. We can only hope they and their loved ones are survivors.

We caught a bus ride in Kathmandu to Pokhora, where we started our trek through the Annapurna massif. The road was terrible, and every other vehicle was a bus. On the trip we had three flat tires. The passengers, mostly locals, laughed. This is just part of their routine.

The people … I tell my wife that we are seeing the “tourist interface,” and the friendliness is part of their need to bring in money. I don’t believe that people are much different anywhere we go. But the smiles register with us, and are are part of our permanent memory.

Kathmandu – we only saw a little of it. Poverty is extreme, roads are dirt, traffic is chaos. Streets are lined with buildings and dark doorways and people sitting minding stores. Plumbing is scant, odors abound. There are no “lanes” on roads and vehicles form clusters, and passing is routine. Cows, sacred in parts of this world, wander the roads. Beggars are common, and we are told to ignore them, as most are paid by entrepreneurs, a form of chattel slavery. The free market works!

We lived mostly without hot showers and with holes in the ground as toilets. I stopped drinking coffee and learned to eat sparsely, having lemon tea and porridge for breakfast, Ramen noodles for lunch and the same for dinner with a slice of bread. It’s really all I needed. I lost five pounds, and felt good.

So now that chaos has had disaster visited on it. What to do to salve our consciences? Life is so good for us, less so for them. The Nepalese government is cash-strapped and not much good most of the time. I don’t trust the Red Cross. I don’t trust the United States or its military to truly want to do anything worthwhile [unless cameras are present].  The Indian government is very good with disasters, highly efficient. I suppose we could send $$$ that way, but it for us to feel good more than anything we could possible do for them. It is not enough.

So we are just like everyone else, watching in dismay and hoping these very tough people can pull together once again and make their lives livable. The smiles are real.

I’ve been puttering in my garage lately while listening to radio programs from the early 70s by Mae Brussell. I am getting a sense of her intelligence, and perhaps some brashness and youthful enthusiasm. She has figured most things out.

In the current programs the Watergate breakin has occurred. She is trying to understand motive and ramifications. She knows the parties involved, and that “burglar” James McCord never truly “resigned” from the CIA. Her co-host has easily figured out that the burglars wanted to be caught. Mae is not up to speed on this.

She is convinced that Richard Nixon will be murdered. Indeed there were attempts on his life during this time, but his security was always top notch. Richard Nixon will be removed from power via the Watergate affair. She’s got motive right, but not means. There were so many public murders during that time that she assumed he’d be done in that way. It makes sense.

Nixon was a right-winger, but as his record indicated, not right wing enough.

Mae is sure that the United States is heading into fascism. Her interest was triggered by the JFK murder and cover-up, and the other public murders that ensued. She knows about Operation Paperclip, and the importation of Nazi scientists and generals by the Dulles brothers, including the infamous General Reinhard Gehlen, who was integral in the newly formed CIA.  She draws a parallel to 1930’s Germany as Nazis murdered their way to power, throwing a wet blanket on opposition and rendering opponents and critics silent by fear and intimidation.

She came from an era when there was still limited access to public airwaves. People then and now are mostly clueless, fed shit and kept in the dark. They imagine fascism to be movie-style blunt intimidation. It is far more subtle than that. While ordinary citizens walk around imagining free speech to matter,  votes counted, choices real, those in power know better.

There is a blanket of fear over government. People are afraid to speak up. Those who do are murdered, imprisoned, or hounded out of office by fake scandals. Everyone is under surveillance. The public is distracted by dumbed-down schooling, entertainment and sports, wedge politics and phony elections.

We attended a town meeting last week here in Conifer/Aspen Park. The subjects discussed were a local highway intersection where accidents are too frequent, fire danger in the forest interface. Such issues are important and our opinions and actions matter. The problem is that people imagine such control exists beyond our townships. That part is a grand illusion.

Mae Brussell died in 1988. I’ve hours of listening to go, years in fact. I’ll be full of wisdom after the fact, but will never lose sight of her foresight, insight, courage and persistence. I hope she someday has her face on a postage stamp along with other patriotic people like Bradley Manning, Ralph Nader, Rachel Corrie, Paul Wellstone, Anthony Weiner, Gary Webb, Dr. Judy Wood.

Never lose faith. That day will come.

“Trotter and LeBon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thought it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology.” (Edward Bernays, Propaganda* (1928)

Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) was a British surgeon who dabbled in social psychology and studied the herd instinct of crowds. Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) was a French psychologist who did the same. Trotter fed on LeBon, and Bernays fed on both. Together, they pioneered the field of modern advertising and propaganda.

Advertising is merely getting people to change their behavior. But honesty does not work in advertising. People do not change their minds based on reason – in fact, are more often reinforced in their beliefs when confronted with evidence they are wrong.

Realizing this, Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, spent his career looking for ways to manipulate and undermine public opinion. He was an extremely clever and dishonest man.

Bernays realized that people are one thing on the surface, and something quite different underneath. Advertising, and all effective mass persuasion, deals with the our subconscious being.

So ads approach us with surface phenomena, usually sex and humor. But the real ad message is first developed by behavioral psychologists. Every ad campaign has artists and copywriters doing overlays on the central theme.

Take Apple: The theme: Apple is a cool product to own. Apple users are more sophisticated than PC people. In what was one of the most effective ad campaigns of all time, Apple computer owners became annoying preachers for the company’s product. PC’s and Macs are virtually identical, differing only in muscle memory for keystrokes. Advertising works.**

Or Obama: The “Hope and Change” campaign won the coveted prize for best marketing campaign in 2008. It was a subtle undermining of the will, allowing viewers to participate by filling in their own aspirations and ideals. I fell for it, reading into Obama what I wanted from politics. He delivered the Neocon Republican agenda, yet still has strong support from Democrats.

Which is Bernays’ most important finding. People don’t think. They follow trusted leaders. They cannot be persuaded on reason. Advertisers and politicians merely supply leaders, undermine our identities, supply their desires for our own.

It does not always work, of course. But it works often enough.
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*Bernays book, Propaganda, is short and accessible, easily read and understood.

** Please note placement of Cool Guy’s thumbs.