[Editor's note: the following text isn't written very well.]
I'm about done with trying to post about stuff that's in the news now-now-now. I'll fade away sometime during this Syria issue and try to focus on a bigger picture with reference to journalists and writers who perform real reporting and analysis outside of the disgusting narrative-formation machine.
Was just listening to President Peace Prize on the radio, in high dudgeon, ask his "liberal friends" how they could reconcile their beliefs with images of children writhing and dying on cold hospital floors in Syria. This kind of argument is one of the core tactics of classic propaganda: an appeal to emotion that bypasses reason. Therefore, it's not an argument at all. Since our schools don't teach rhetoric and applied logic, this cheap-jack public speaking technique ties most people in knots---especially liberals who are "troubled" by issues such as the Obama-propelled NSA surveillance state and the proposed launching of missile attacks on weak countries without a compelling US national interest. Liberal blogs are full of sentiment along the lines that while they don't agree with the President on these issues, he's still a sincere and awesome man who they like and who shares their values. And this sentiment also carries a halo effect to produce comments like this one from Balloon Juice:
Even with the NSA and Syria and whatever other Watergates I’ve forgotten about, it’s hard not to feel good about the future of the Democratic party right now.All because Rush Limbaugh wrote a stupid book that must be mocked. Why should this fool be cheered by the future of a Democratic party that can swallow any Republican-type policy atrocity as long as their own guy is in charge? It's as if they think Republicans don't already control all three branches of the government through obstructionism, domination of mainstream media, and undiminished mastery of fomenting the worst instincts of the populace. The Democratic version of this crypto-fascist performance art is acceptable because they like their president's style?
Apropos of a bigger picture, I'd like to suggest a few books that offer some nonconventional perspective. Importantly, they were authored outside the corporate narratives that constrain our imaginations. Start with Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television, by Jerry Mander. You can get by with reading Part I of the book; Part II is the same material, but written in a more scholarly style with documentation and references. (A significant amount of the material pertaining to the physical harmfulness of CRT-based TVs is passe or overcome by later developments, but all the important principles remain valid and prophetic, in my view.)
If you want to improve your understanding of political conservatism and all its apparent self-contradictions, read The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin. Starting from the correct proposition that universities do a poor job of educating students---even political science students---about conservatism and its origins, Robin gets to the origins of the ideology back to Thomas Hobbes, who even predates conservative godfather Edmund Burke. Using the writings of all the seminal conservative thinkers, up through Ayn Rand and Bill Buckley (and later), Robin makes a compelling case that the real tenets of conservatism are much different than what it's proponents have professed to the rest of us.
Finally, track down a copy of Vaclav Havel's Power of the Powerless to read, from the pen of a 20th century dissident with more guts than an abattoir, how authoritarian states begin to lose their hold when citizens refocus on the true aims of life. And remember that formulation: the true aims of life, or the authentic aims of life, or the genuine aims of life.
This last document is important for what I wish to start writing about as I can purge myself of the "dailiness" of the corporate narrative machine. Following it is such a drag, and trying to discuss it with people who believe in it ("news junkies") is worse.
