from kenny's sideshow: I finally saw the 1988 movie "They Live" today and realized what Peter Chamberlin is saying with his blog title 'There Are No Sunglasses'. I also saw a little of the Stewart and Colbert sanity/fear rally and you don't need the sunglasses to see through it.The lefty counterpoint to the righty Glenn Beck hijacked Tea Party types. The lefties may be a little more fun but no less propagandizing. It's breaking us down into two groups that oppose each other as if that's all there is.
But most of us don't actually fit into this false duplicity. We're the ones who don't like Stewart and Obama, Beck and Palin. Using conventional terms we as individuals are a mix of conservative, liberal, moderate, radical or what ever you want to call it. Sort of 'mongrels' that don't fit what the media wants us to be.
A real rally for America would be anti-war, anti-imperialism and most definitely anti-criminal government and anti-wall street/banker syndicate. Basically it would be looking for the truth wherever it leads us. We haven't seen much of that in these controlled for TV gatherings.
Rallies have always been used to manipulate the masses. The crowd cheers "hooray for us" and goes home satiated. A lot of good people want to be involved, a lot of good people fall for the deceptions.
1 comment:
Hey Jim,
Have you watched John Stewart's closing remarks to the rally? The moment of sincerity? If you haven't I highly recommend it.
I hear what I think you're saying, that what this rally is doing is counterproductive and adds to people's complacency and indifference just when we need people to not be complacent and indifferent. But I think to stop there is to miss the point.
First and foremost, they are having a laugh at the expense of a lot of clowns who deserve to be laughed at. In the process they are hopefully pointing out some hypocrisies. Whether or not they were successful is certainly up for debate but I'd hope you'd agree that such satire is a valid form of social criticism.
I've heard a lot of people condemning the rally as making fun of people who are angry at the establishment and taking to the streets. I don't think that's accurate and Stewart directly addressed that in his closing. Just like you, I think his main point is that the media is lying to us and trying to divide us by scaring us and making us enemies of one another. He says at one point, "we are living in hard times, not end times" and I think that's an apt statement for what's going on right now.
You know that our leadership loves to have us scared. It sells and keeps things simple. What Stewart is saying, I think, is not that we shouldn't be angry. We totally should. Just not at each other the way our leaderships seems to want.
-John G.
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