Two stories are being used to control perceptions today, one of them even somewhat spontaneous.

1. Capture of Taliban #2 man: If anyone reading this has ever heard of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar before today, do speak up. In television drama, this is known as “moving the story forward.” Afghanistan is a murky place, and we’ve never really given a good demon to focus our hatred on. But somehow we have to be ushered along, rooting for our team as they seek to defeat the villains.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is just some dude, and he cannot possibly lead to the capture of Osama, unless it is a fake Osama, as Osama probably died in 2003 shortly after he denied any involvement in 9/11.

There are military objectives in Afghanistan, and somehow it became an emergent situation in 2008 after it became apparent that patriotic resistance in Iraq had been beaten down. Whatever is going on over there, public opinion is being managed right now, and the occasional capture of the “number two” man is part it. Move that story forward.

Evan Bayh, presidential timbre, steps down. In case no one notices, Evan Bayh probably was facing a tough reelection battle, as he is a conservadem, a right winger, part of the cadre of Democrats who led the party down the conciliatory path that will lead to a well-earned disaster at the polls this year. A good thing.

His wife, Susan, has been politely called a “boardwalker”, serving on the board of numerous health care companies, including Wellpoint, since his election, and making boatloads of money. Bayh is compromised in total, useless now if ever of any use before.

So why is he being touted as a potential presidential candidate? Right wing democrats have automatic credentials.

So here’s how the read the story – he’s going down due to lack of popular support even though he has tons of money behind him. He’ll be resurrected at some point. Loser Republicans usually turn up at Heritage or American Enterprise. Bayh will most likely turn up at Wellpoint.

Susan Bayh may be out of work now, if she ever worked at all.

Footnote: According to John Amato, Bayh’s primary lead in Indiana was “insurmountable”, so he was not to be undone by a Democratic challenge. Perhaps it is the quandary that Harry Truman described, that given a choice between a Democrat who acts like a Republican, and a real Republican, voters will take the real thing every time.

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?

I wrote the following letter that appeared in the Denver Post. I was a little bit annoyed (moi?) that they were all over JD Salinger’s death, giving him front page and a big story inside, but only gave Howard Zinn brief mention on page 11. They did take the trouble to note in the headline that Zinn’s book was “leftist.”

Re: “Author Salinger a legend, recluse,” and “Author Zinn wrote leftist ‘A People’s History,’ ” Jan. 29 obituaries.

Two authors of note passed on last week: J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s creation in “The Catcher in the Rye,” is a bright but misdirected young man, searching, confused and in clueless rebellion. People often use Caulfield as an archetype to reflect on their own youthful years before responsibilities took over. Salinger’s passing ignited widespread fits of self-indulgence.

Zinn was given brief note on page 11 of The Post, and dutifully identified as a “leftist.” (Just curious: On passing, were Milton Freidman or Ronald Reagan identified as a “right wingers” for Post readers?) Zinn was a fighter pilot in World War II, among the first to use napalm. Then he did the unusual: he self-reflected and changed course, thereafter leading an uncompromised life.

What ever happened to young Holden Caulfield? Did he choose the road not taken? Salinger never let on.

Mark Tokarski, Boulder

The sentence in boldface was deleted by the Post, but heck, it’s a big deal to me to have a letter published in a big city newspaper, and they improved it a bit, as the comment was off-track.

Newspaper editors unconsciously reveal their bias in the headlines they tag on stories, as in compulsively labeling Zinn a “leftist.” Those who write the stories do the same as they hang tags on the people they write about. Generally I see a tendency to follow official state propaganda – so and so is a “terrorist” while someone else is a “strongman” or “warlord,” those terms reserved for official enemies. People on ‘our’ side who engage in the same behaviors (Israelis savaging Palestinians or Americans launching drone attacks on Afghan weddings) are not given such labels. (Has any newspaper ever referred to American attackers as “militants”?)

In politics, it is rare to see someone labeled as a “right winger”, even as so many in the news are just that. But it is not unusual to label people leftists or terrorists for benefit of the readers. It helps us think for ourselves.

And I say “unconsciously” as I know that to maintain sanity in this crazy world, we all have to buy in to what we are doing. We cannot live comfortably doing things we do not believe in. It helps to buy in, so those of us who work for others subconsciously adopt the mindsets of those who control our work behaviors. Newspaper editors will indignantly tell us that no one ever tells them what to write. But if they were not housebroken, they would not be editors.

President Obama appeared before congressional members and made a stunning show of it, impressing even the right-wing commentator Jon Stewart. Now, David Corn tells us, “A bipartisan group of bloggers, techies, and consultants is now demanding they do it again. And again.”

It’s important to note here that there has been no substantive change in policy emanating from the White House, that Rahm Emanuel still regards Senate liberals as “fucking retarded”.

Here’s how to connect the dots: President Obama has brought back David Plouffe, his campaign manager. He is doing some image management.

As the inimitable Rusty Shackleford would say, “That is all.”

The New Yorker recently ran an article on Boulder/Austin resident John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. (Food Fighter, Jan 4, 2010.) I found in it common ground between socialists and capitalists, where each of us must give up something to get something.

First, the down side. Whole Foods is a very expensive place to shop. Consequently, there is no reach-out to people of ordinary means. When they scout locations for new stores, they count the number of college graduates within ten miles of the store. Score one for the capitalists.

John Mackey is a very conservative man who is pursuing a business model that embraces lefties, in a sense manipulating us. He caters to our tastes and fetishes with granola food and aisle upon aisle of cultural abundance, much of it shipped in daily from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

Mackey also made an untimely remark about national health care in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He’s against it. This sparked the usual left-wing uprising and calls for the usual futile gesture, a boycott.

Mackey is anti-union. This again flies in the face of his constituency. He is a believer in free markets, and believes that workers are amply rewarded without unions. China aside, I will leave that alone today.

But here is the upside: Whole Foods pays its help well and gives them good benefits, thereby marginalizing unionization efforts. It’s a nice compromise.

Whole Foods tries, as best it is able, to buy locally and pay fair prices for its products. There is a natural clash in this philosophy simply because of its success. It has to feed many mouths, and to do that must operate on a large scale. Consequently, we have the phenomenon of mass-market “organic” food, which pushes the line towards compromise to achieve efficiency.

So if you buy a dozen brown eggs from Whole Foods, it is probably wise not to go too far back down the food chain to see if those chickens really were allowed to wander freely and pick and peck at bugs, their favorite activity.

But Whole Foods is sincere about its ethics. Organic food may not be more nutritious than processed food, but it takes less toll on the land, introduces less petroleum and insecticides into the growing process. Organic cows have better lives before slaughter, actually getting time to enjoy being cows. Organic pigs are not docked or kept in miserable pens prior to slaughter.

Paying extra at Whole Foods may be a conscience-salving exercise for we of the gray pony tail set, but it has real benefits for hired help, animals, the land. and the farmers who raise our food.

In Whole Foods I find that not all is good or wholesome, that we are making compromises. But unlike a Democratic Party “compromise”, Whole Foods does not demand that we give up all our values, and I shop there willingly knowing that both the right and the left have gained something in the process.

And, we can afford it. That’s a stickler.