Why did it happen?

[Jackpine Radical]

Because America has become the land of the Pod People.

Americans no longer seem able to process information at all effectively, and that--like children--they cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, and you have a formula for the kind of disaster we just saw. The problem lies not so much in any surface strategy, but in what the American mind has become: an uncritical, infantile, passive receptacle for whatever simplistic pap the media choose to feed it, bereft of a sense of history, anti-intellectual, ready to accept any sort of nonsense from authority figures who seem to know what they're talking about.

More than 30 years ago a psychologist named Tom Budzynski invented a device called the "Twilight Learner." It combines an EEG device with a tape recorder. The client is hooked up with electrodes and when they start to put out theta waves over a certain threshold, the tape player comes on and delivers pre-recorded suggestions. Theta waves are associated with deep relaxation ahd high suggestibility. If the client starts to emerge from the theta state, the tape player shuts off until the theta waves start up again. The procedure is more effective than traditional hypnosis because you never really know what level of receptivity the client's brain is in when you are giving your suggestions.

I suspect that TV drives the brain into a theta state, rendering it more prone to uncritical acceptance of the messages it sends. I think we have a whole populace now with brains and awarenesses that have been prepped and shaped by the sinister box in the corner.