"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."
-Noam Chomsky
“You will observe a vast wasteland.”
Former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow
"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
-T.S Elliott
This past month, in the United States, alone, according to the National Unidentified Flying Object Reporting Center , there were one thousand, two hundred and nine sightings of unidentified phenomenon, objects seen throughout this country, in less than four weeks.
Even if a significant number of these civilian reports are explainable, this is the escalating extension of a disturbing trend, not that the territorial airspace of this nation is being navigated routinely by unknown phenomenon, but that,perhaps more importantly, the lid on this boiling pot is as sealed as securely as it ever was, by the inability of our national media, as well as journalism in general, to report rather than entertain, to investigate rather than console or advise us.
What it means to be a profitable enterprise, despite the orthodox view, is not always measured in a currency you see on a bank statement.
What Edward R Murrow prophesied these many decades ago, has come to pass, and we as citizens of a participatory democracy that largely remains a grand concept, can no longer participate to any significant degree, nor consent or dissent without one critically vital keystone of communication, which is information.
What I am referring to is the silence of the media in regard to the silence of our government as well the silence of many in the scientific community, the military, NASA and our political "leaders" specifically in regard to the number one thousand, two hundred and nine. The thread that stitches these groups together are the corporations that are perhaps the propaganda arm that protects the few against the many.
However at the same time, the proliferation of alternative news sources such as The Anomalist and\or The Daily Grail, to name a few, have provided an invaluable service in upholding our common rights in the theoretical democracy of information.
Television itself, in particular, has utterly failed to inform, educate or offer alternative paradigms other than those officially endorsed by the powers that be.
Our choices are preselected and that by which we ratify, by our decision to view one program versus another is a trifle and intentionally so, I suggest to you that this situation is a sleight of hand.
Being one of those unfortunates who lived or should I say survived, through the debacle of the Vietnam War and had friends and acquaintances return addicted to heroin, crippled and missing limbs, there is one name that remains as freshly imprinted in my memory as if those long ago events were still occurring, although, as you know, in a certain sense, they still are.
What and whom I am referring to is Noam Chomsky and the advent of corporate media and the nature of concision, the editing and selective compression of information and any dialog into five minute segments, thus assuring a lack of context,background information,comparative analysis and limiting of discussion.
The advent of 24/7 news media is largely a longer version of concision in that essentially five or six brief reports are repeated ad nauseum in a "news cycle" despite the increasing complexity and enfolded nature of global events, the corporate media is not a democratic institution and it is free to avoid any report it deems heretical to predetermined dissent, the promotion of self comfort and a stable business environment to market and sell reinforcing behaviors.
All of this is in the service of a politically profitable agenda to intentionally control, a comparatively illiterate public in order to sell their most important product,the manufacture of a consensus to protect the few from the many, as James Madison intended.
For this and only this reason, there are many who are considered heretics, dissenters, theoreticians and those of a philosophic bent who will never be heard due to the simple fact they diverge from the reinforcement of commonly held views.
I recently wrote about signal communications from the cellular level to the role of language toward behavior in relation to paranormal events and so it seems only fitting, to punctuate the role of corporate media as well as it being logical to this correspondent to revisit the dissenting views of Mr Chomsky.
What I am left with is an unspoken truism that shimmers just below the surface of appearances, a propaganda campaign of subtleties is being silently waged between two dissimilar factions in direct competition, one is concerned with the reinforcement of certainty and the other is working overtime in the tilling of unpredictability, one that is reported in the data of NUFORC and the other in the absence of reports in the media concerning the rapid increase of a strange and uncontrollable form, advertising a competitive presence in our skies.
"The world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world...'
- Castaneda: "Tales of Power."
There is an equally strange Malthusian echo that reverberates in the moments when I frame this portrait in that one may be biding it's time whilst the other unravels itself in a slowly unfolding ballet of soft collapse, that ends with a whimper and not a bang. Perhaps planting a flag that softens the ground as it is staked is a wise choice if the ruling cultural paradigm of political rule is about to unexpectedly implode.
Setting a stage also comes to mind, in advance of events yet to occur but yet determined by a means of which we have no comprehension as a form of abstracted fatalism or perhaps, pragmatism, which admittedly is difficult to associate and yet here we have it's key elements;
1. Deconstruction ( terms, certainty, credibility, reality, theology, time,)
2. Reorientation ( history, mythology, folklore, language)
3. Decoherence ( purpose, relationships,consensus, psychology, experience)
Between these two factions lies thought, a dangerous and yet wondrous commodity of trade that is preeminently pliable, not to infer we are but pawns in a psychological dispute of differing philosophies, but I note the silence, the terse replies, the non committal stance and the refusal to broach the subject of the other party by those who rule over us, to be telling.
So it was during the Ides of March. We now return to our normal broadcasting schedule as the clock chimes midnight through the smog and haze announcing the arrival of the much anticipated fleet, but unawares, with eyes focused, wide shut, the games go on unimpeded in Rome.
Good night and good luck.
