hegemon news

sunday's new york times has a "special section" titled "in case you missed it"...twenty three pages of articles the times finds it imperative i read/remember with the the twenty-fourth as a self-published paean to the times as the seeker and defender of the "truth" in these troubled, trumpist times..which is where we begin to have doubts...i have said ( and still maintain ) that media outlets are corporate interests with editorial boards, boards of directors, and shareholders , all in search of profit and all of which is bound to distort the way the present the news and render none of them objective...they are appealing to a core audience and pandering to that audience's world view...more than that though they are influencing that world view with an editorial line that runs through all the edited reporting ( one would like to see the pre-edited copy once in a while as an index of objectivity )...reinforcing viewpoints to a purpose...and while that purpose clearly includes profit i am inclined to think it moves beyond money and into the realm of power...already in possession of influence, they use that to maintain a separation among the general public into camps divided by opinion on a wealth of subjects from abortion and gun control to which cola tastes better...in essence i don't think the times or fox news or cnbc much cares what i think...as long as it is something different than what my neighbor thinks...as long as he and i are bickering over whether this is "the bear's year" or not we aren't thinking about why it is so difficult for working people to make ends meet and if we really need that new flat screen tv and who, in the end, is actually benefiting from all this divisiveness and consumerism...it isn't the "man in the street"...it's the factions in congress and their owners and the times doesn't want me to ponder that too closely...oh they want me to support the faction in congress they share ownership in with some other individuals and interest groups...but they aren't especially interested in me delving into the reasons why i am thinking the way i am...let them worry about the whys...we'll all be better off that way, right? and a lot of what appears in the times seems to trickle into the evening news and into the local paper throughout the week...one wonders about that...is the times that influential as "the paper of record" or is it that the media as a group are simply acting in their own interests and they way those interests coincide give the appearance of collusion? either way the public are misled and flat out lied to through distortions that serve to benefit a minority rather than inform a majority...the times says it is not an elitist newspaper...it advertising and editorializing put the lie to that..."objectivity in reporting" is an astounding oxymoron wherever you look in media..the times is an invaluable resource...always good to have a look at what the other side is thinking...they certainly loathe don trump...i am of the same opinion...our reasons for that would seem to be very different...i am aligned with the times on that...the reason why are radically different.

"it's safe to drink"

so says the mayor of this municipality...yeah...and the economy is working for all of us ( astonishing how wealth so rarely moves any way but up the socio-economic ladder but the liabilities are always "public" ) and that's what they told the people in flint too...there was a "computer glitch" that allowed too many minerals into the water supply...there are a lot of water main breaks...the lines need flushing but the weather is all wrong...the part they need will be here tomorrow...and if you'd just let the private water company buy the public utility we wouldn't have all these problems...a multiplicity of excuses as reasons and meanwhile i am washing my dishes and clothes...and me in this dreck...this is not a new issue...a water filtration plant was built here around six years ago to address this issue..of course that was during the tenure of the now incarcerated criminal ex-mayor and may just be a maze of pipes and kick-backs that does nothing...who knows? anyone who does isn't talking...so..faced with an open ended water issue there will be bottled water in the house until further notice...and the obfuscation from the politicians will continue unabated..it is the way of things...."we can't catch a break on this"...i'm hip.

selling is a cultural norm

it is a given that the wall street journal has no clue about my personal history...and if they did they wouldn't much care how their forays into the commercial world would or would not impact my perceptions...business is business and damn the consumer's sensibilities..the n y times might, if they mined their archive have a bit better idea stemming from comments i have made concerning some howlers they have published regarding addictive behaviors...they probably won't...so it came as not much of a surprise when the envelope with "new york times' printed on it fell out of my copy of friday's paper containing this:

some printed matter extolling the qualities and economies wjs wines can provide the readers of the new york times...and:

a couple of vouchers that would allow me to take $240 off the top of the cost of my first two orders..it would be easy to go off on a rant about the elitist nature of wine and the true constituency both the ny times and the wall street journal aim at while insisting they are news sources for the everyman and not commercial enterprises with a distinct bias...that would be beside the point..there are some people who can snuggle up to a glass of wine, drink it, and then move on to something else...not me...i never understood the logic of an open bottle that wasn't empty...and i am still deeply prone to immoderate behaviors...that won't go away..but i learned a long time ago how much harm the darker side of alcohol does to me and those near me..the n y times and the wall street journal don;t care about that...neither does society at large...as a sub-culture we are pretty much on our own in this...even the "health care professionals" are comprehending only in a textbook manner...they lack experience...no fault of theirs and it is experience they should probably avoid..without it however they just don't get it...never will...end rant...hang tough...peace out people.

overfed

i have been rereading orwell's "homage to calalonia" and i cannot recommend it highly enough...in fact i would recommend reading orwell's non-fiction ( "the road to wigan pier" or " down and out in paris and london"for example ) and essays as a sort of counterpoint to "animal farm" and "1984"...he had more depth than that...and ion it he spends some time analyzing how the media outside spain simplified and slanted their coverage of events to fit a few preexisting views on fascism held by the balance of news consumers of the day...they lied by omission in other words...something we should all be familiar with...media outlets are corporate interests dedicated to acquiring and retaining an audience by telling it what it wants to here rather than anything objective ( this is true of msnbc, fox, the n y times, and any other one you's care to mention ) and so are more than happy to omit anything that might perturb readers/viewers/listeners...orwell was also a believer in a strong sapir/whorf hypothesis...that language controls thought and that by limiting language ( newspeak ) you can limit thought..nah..i will buy into a weak spir/whorf...some aspects of culture and society can define parameters of thought but those can be disrupted by epiphany...he also was deeply mired in "he who controls the past controls the future" and believed that propaganda sought to control the debate by unmooring historical perspective through the physical alteration and destruction of the past...as much as i admire orwell and feel he has a better handle on the political apparatus than huxley's hedonistic approach to societal control ( "better a gram than a damn" )we are about to part company...the curent crop of corporate propagandists are not trying to physically destroy the past...there is no "memory hole"...what;'s up instead is that there is such an abundance of conflicting material geared towards the specific beliefs of readers/viewers/listeners that finding any certainty is a challenge...you can read/watch/listen to anything you want and who knows what is what? you can find argument and "facts" to shore up any sort of belief system out there...no matter how extreme or unreasonably inane...an over abundance of information/opinion that distorts reality rather than a dearth...where to start rather than where to find...there's no end to it.

non-reformist reform

for me at least this advertisement from today's new york times magazine holds significant insight as to why the political system seems so disconnected and unresponsive to the actual needs ( you can forget desires ) of the polity at large...the system is consquentialist...is assigns ethical merit by what people have and how they achieved it is pretty much secondary...it's what you have, not what you are that matters...bny mellon understands this and wants to help you reach that gold standard of ethical preeminence by supplying you with a route to "never ending wealth "...there are a number of roads to wealth...televangelism...successful fraud...and this merits a brief aside...the system does not have many ethical rules about acquisition but a few do exist about sources of wealth...bernie madoff and jay gould were not necessarily vilified for fraud so much as whom they defrauded...jay gould stole from the stockholders and was made egregious...bernie, more recently, defrauded wealth as well...wealth frowns on loss...you can bilk and fleece the hoi polloi, be very careful appropriating wealth from the wealthy...politics is another road to wealth...have a careful look at the net worth of members of this congress and do some research on the next...they have more money than you...they are in the service of an acquisitive system and are becoming wealthy themselves...this does not bode well for substantive political change...i am prepared to believe that there are people who enter politics in a spirit of public service...i am not so much cynical about people as i am about institutions..which is what leads me to believe that their idealism doesn't stand much of a chance when it grinds up against institutional inertia...the system of government the framers instituted is profoundly resistant to substantive change...it requires an overwhelming agreement between rulers and ruled for it to come about and that, given the tribal and self-interested nature of humans, is a rarity...most likely the bits and pieces of their idealism that buttress the democratic image of the hegemonic culture will be co-opted...any hint of non-cosmetic change will be quickly squelched...a "blue wave"? bear in mind that the framers were all about defending the status quo from the depredations of an "interested and overbearing majority"..so it's hopeless is what i'm saying, right?

no, not entirely..i voted last friday...in terms of primaries, general elections, and off year local primaries and elections this marks the fifty-sixth time i have voted since 1972 and intend to continue for as long as i can...because it makes politicians nervous when a lot of people vote...it isn't going to alter the inertia of the system much...but it just might make them nervous enough about outcomes ( they love voter apathy...it becomes much more predictable when the only people voting are those directly benefiting from the systemic cronyism ) that they might have to pay some attention to voter needs rather than their handlers' interests...so go vote...the effort may prove worthwhile in terms of establishing some actual accountability... another small aside...this from personal history...my grandfather, whom i did not know..he died twenty years before i was born, was a politician in a small indiana town in the 1920s...my father knew his father and, i believe, loved him...my father also knew his father's political cronies and his constituents and said, in my hearing and something my mother repeated often well into her old age, "if an honest man goes into politics his friends will make him dishonest quick enough"...this holds true form the city council to the senate...jay gould is in the white house and even with a "blue wave" the prospects are grim...these people are not going to surrender their prerogatives readily.

all the news that's fit to print

the title of this post has been on the masthead of every new york times front page since who knows when and it could just as easily read " all the news that fits we print"...i am critical of the times a lot...mostly because it is "the paper of record" that has a lot of influence in "the media"...it is not alone in its foibles...no medium that provides "news" is unbiased or objective despite some of their claims ( one presumes fox does not claim objectivity...too laughable...probably even tot those who share their world view )...they are corporate entities seeking profit...of and for the status quo...they may disagree with specific policies editorially but they are not remotely in favor of any substantive revision of hierarchies...the n y times does indeed loathe don trump ( funny but when i type the name that way auto correct does not cue me to capitalize it ) but only because they see his actions as detrimental to their own economic interests ( and, one presumes, those of their advertisers...i don't see bloomingdale's or citibank or tiffany or ford or amazon yanking ads over the times editorializing about "riling up the crazies" or the gop's attempts to "block the ballot box" )...but they are not editorializing about "the system"...only about an administration that is so upfront and arrogantly blatant about what "the system" is, which is oligarchical and extractive ( what, exactly, do you do that caries no cost to you? dwell on that for a time )...and the disconnect between the lite and the rest of us that the trumpists are highlighting continues to grow as mcconnell says it isn't tax cuts for wealth that are the problem but rather "entitlements" like medicare and social security...well...they are not "entitlements"...programs like social security are ones i have paid into all my working life...what trump and his cronies are doing is spotlighting the extortionist proclivities of hegemonic culture and it is making the times nervous..."the crazies", if pushed far enough economically, might come tot he realization that migrant caravans are not the issue, "the system" is...this worries the times because actual substantive change could curtail their prerogatives and put a crimp in the n y time's store sales...so all media are mouthpieces for for various competing factions of the hegemonic culture and a conciliatory voice offering no real alternative, just a plea to "fix" the system of which they are an integral part...( elites do not have to be cabalistic to be more united than the divided mass of the citizenry with its petty and violent squabbles which distract their attention from the actual perpetrators of their disaffections...all they have to do is act in their own self-interest and they are advancing class interest, however, since their class interest is based on taking everything they possibly can, they are also in competition and they will, occasionally, cut one another's throats...still...greed unites...abortion and gun control divide )...all of this promotes a political system ( logically enough ) that systematically redistribute wealth upward and mythologizes they system's unbiased fairness for public consumption ( we all have an equal chance to be as greedy as congress )..so the disconnect between the governed and the government is more clearly visible than it has been in say fifty years...so...what do we do? all the alternatives seem to entail some continuation of elitism under new management..."business as usual"with a different ceo and a shuffling of congressional membership...don't count on a "blue wave" and if it should materialize don't count on a change in much of anything beyond the tone of rhetoric...two points...1) they are politicians and so liars and, 2) representatives from other districts and states don't give a rat's ass what i think..incumbents generally win...the system isn't exactly set in stone...but the inertia of the institutions is skewed heavily towards the status quo...the framers wanted it that way.

fear drives the machine

"a joyless existence, overshadowed by death and anxiety; human material for the authoritarian personality." herbert marcuse actually talking about martin heidegger's philosophy...but heidegger was a nazi and so it is germane__________one of the more noteworthy aspects of the current mid-term elections is how any and everyone is running a fear based campaign..that the trumpists would be whipping up as much hysterical anxiety as any of their fake news outlets can engender is not a surprise...the "progressives" are no better...and honestly this is no shock either...immigrants are going to take my job or congress will take my medicare...ms-13 will hack me to death with machetes or the government will become authoritarian...the government has always bee, if quietly, coercive and unafraid to employ violence when it feels threatened by substantive change from below which might threaten the elite's ( and the elite is the government...more there in a bit ) prerogatives to maintain and expand a base of wealth and power..have a look at how governments...local, state, national...dealt with labor activists be they anarchists, wobblies, or industrial unionists..leaving out nixon, macarthy, witch hunts, pumpkin papers, domino theories, black lists and a slew of other oppressions from the past...the government is one of special interests...not by or of the people...it just tries to keep quiet about it ( until some jerk like trump, who can't keep his mouth shut, gets into office and begins to highlight the disconnect )...which brings me to another point...the champions of "the street" are no less members of the elite who are playing the game by a somewhat different set of rules but still using fear as a base...warren is worth ( last figures i could find ) $18 million and pelosi has more money than ted kennedy did...they are generating fear for their own gain every bit as much as the trumpists...one wonders who is playing whom and what they are after..honestly the hysteria about a blue wave and the need to "take back" congress is bullshit...take it back from whom? and for whom? i have input in exactly two races for congress...i do not need to be propagandized about the cruz/o'roruke contest...waste of my time and theirs...except that it might make me more anxious and thus more easily manipulated...the media love consternation...sells advertising..moves goods...i will vote...i always do...i will vote what i think is the best alternative in a fucked situation..i always do because the system does not represent me...its priorities are elsewhaere.