Pictures at a Lunatics' Exhibition

[arendt]

Pictures at a Lunatics' Exhibition
by arendt

..." 'Bedlam is justly famed as the best Dry Walk in London'....

....the full range of Londoners strolled from door to door, peering in at each window
....to behold whatever spectacle lay within...maniacs carried on furious disputes with
....entities not visibly present, or raved about whatever phant'sy was most on their minds;
....the most animated drew small crowds, which laughed at those rantings of a sexual or
....political nature, and goaded them to further outbursts. A maniac was trying to tell the
....world that Louis XIV was controlling London from a secret aerie atop the dome
....of St. Paul's, employing an army of Jesuits who could, through sorcery, metamorphose
....into gray doves. A young man told him that a whole flock of such doves had been
....sighted entering the cupola of Bedlam through a broken window. This news drove the
....maniac into transports of horror and sent him back to his cell as fast as he could waddle.
....The violent jangling of his chains mixed with the laughter and applause of the onlookers,
....making the gallery too noisy for conversation."

........- Neal Stephenson, "The System of the World"

Science and technology have given us so many wonders! Before there was the corporate media, the public had to travel all the way to lunatic asylums, like Bedlam, in order to entertain itself. But now, the window to the next cell is as close as a flick of the remote clicker. Each cell contains a different theatre of the absurd - something for every taste. Let's take a stroll through this marvelous virtual gallery, pausing at a few of the Pictures in an Exhibition. (The names below are the original ones from the movements of Mussorgsky's tone poem.)


1. Dispute between Children at Play

The idiotic over-reaction of the Boston PD in the case of the Aqua Teen Lite Brites is what made me decide that, finally, American media and government spokesmen have jumped the shark. They are nuts - totally detached from reality.

The media has decided to call this event a "hoax", even though no one intended a hoax. The police have decided to call the event a "felony" (hardly clear which one that might be) and the lite brites a "bomb" (all the components of an IED except the explosives). The police seem to have no informers (lite brites were up for days), no experts in pop culture, no explosive sniffers, and no brains at all. Fatherland Security has announced that there can be no such thing as overreaction when dealing with terrorism. And, CNN has decided to legitimize the claim that some kind of crime was committed by paying a penalty. Everyone knows that CNN got a lot more than a million bucks worth of publicity out of the whole fiasco. So, its not a penalty, its a cut-rate advertising payoff to the Boston PD.

The whole episode was surreal enough to be a sketch on Saturday Night Live.

2. Cattle

"The housing market is experiencing a mild correction." How much longer can the plummeting wreckage of the $11 trillion housing bubble be swept under the carpet? As ARMs reset, more and more people are being pushed out of their over-leveraged homes. Bankruptcy rates have jumped by factors of two or three. Southwest Florida house prices have fallen by close to 50%. The savings rate is at lower levels than in the Great Depression.

The claim that the housing situation is within normal parameters is absurd. Yet, it continues to be promulgated so that banks and real estate swindlers can squeeze the last drop of blood from the suckers.

3. Ballet of the Unhatched Chickens

"Impeachment is off the table". After six years of class warfare, serial incompetence, tax giveaways to the rich, warmongering, massive corruption, the destruction of the Constitution, and three stolen elections, the Democrats are giving Bush and Cheney a clean slate to start the new Congress. The first thing the Senate GOP did in response was to introduce $70 Billion of giveaways to try to kill a minimum wage bill and to filibuster a non-binding resolution on the Iraq War.

The GOP are still firing live ammunition. The Democrats still need a spine transplant. The Democratic leadership is hopelessly compromised by traitors like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. The DLC is still a war-loving fifth column. None of these issues is given any real airtime, except to dismiss it as the ravings of the loony left.

4. The Market at Limoges

As Dick Cheney puts the finishing touches on his joint American-Israeli strike on Iran, the Congress is busy trying to negotiate a metaphorical slap on the wrist for the Iraq debacle to date. The media constantly reminds them not to undercut the troops. Hillary, Edwards, and Joe Lieberman remind us that Iran is dangerous.

Pardon me. We are the ones boxing Iran into a corner over a bunch of obsolete centrifuges that the CIA knows full well are junk, beacuse they arranged for A.Q. Khan to sell them. The world press reports that they keep breaking down. The world press, and French president Chirac, do not think this techno-junk is much more of a threat than Saddams's bogus unmanned aerial vehicles.

The misdirection and misemphasis of the American media on the Iraq/Iran situation is a total dereliction of duty. It is a replay of the WMD lies that led to the equally criminal war on Iraq. When they put the war criminals on trial, I want to see the heads of the corporate media in the dock along with Cheney and Rumsfeld.

5. The Hut of Baba Yaga, the witch

When the California blogger, Spocko, had the cleverness to tape the on-air racist comments of KFSO radio personalities (such as Lee "stomp his guts out" Rodgers) and play the tapes to the advertisers for the show, the station tried to shut him down. It took the likes of the Electronic Freedom Foundation to set the record straight about freedom of speech. (" Spocko didn't do anything that millions of bloggers don't do every day: post commentary alongside slices of copyrighted material...This is prototypical fair use of copyrighted material,")

The corporate media respect no freedom but the freedom of money to speak whatever lies it pleases. Their "integrity" is a sick joke.

----

The only difference between today's America and the Soviet Union is that the crap the corporate media publishes is not the official party line of the state, with government sanctions and interrogations for unbelievers. But, such penalties are not far off, if Spocko, the Dixie Chicks, and Bill Maher are any indication.

We have been around this loop many times before in the past six years of lunacy: Bizarro World, Faux News, the reality-based community, the inconvenient truth. But, this time around I simply cannot stomach any more of it. These vicious bastards intend to start another war they can't finish, trash the rest of the U.S. government and Bill of Rights, loot what little remains of a middle class, and impose a police state where a teddy bear in the wrong place is cause for a city-wide lockdown.

Meanwhile the nut cases in the media blather on about irrelevant crap and tell us that black is white when it comes to politics. (Barack Obama is eminently qualified to run for president, you see. How could you think he is a nobody just because he has no national experience? He is, you know, a corporate bootlicker of the first rank. The media is certainly not pumping him and Hillary up in order to frog march us into the next election cycle before anyone has done any governing in this cycle.)

From here on, if I hear someone repeat something ludicrous from the media, I am not going to argue with that person. I'm simply going to laugh my head off and ridicule the person. And that includes anyone who disagrees with this essay. Anyone who buys this stuff is as nuts as the media peddling it. If I have to walk through Bedlam, I am certainly going to appreciate the humor of the situation