Snarky the Rabid Marmoset™ reminds you to take extreme care in your choice of schoolground arguments. Rational debate is out of fashion, and, while laudable, doesn’t seem the right style choice in the Era of Bad Feeling.
Take care in your choice of schoolyard epithets …
It is telling that the top story on Memeorandum ever since shortly after midnight EST and since ten minutes after midnight PST has been how we ought not be taking the Princess of Moosylvania seriously. This is a bizarro-world reality in which an article on how we ought not be featuring Sarah Palin in the news is, therefore, the top news of the cycle. As though the inhabitants of Reality™ had remained sober for New Year’s Eve, but the Universe had drunk too much alcohol and taken too many drugs.
Undoubtedly a powerful hallucinogen.
But there is method to that madness, and we will see it in the year ahead:
It’s called psychological conditioning, and we saw its effectiveness in the drumbeat of ‘incipient electoral catastrophe’ that preceded last year’s election, and proved successful. It is also a primary weapon in psychological warfare operations, known as PSY-OPS, and has been privatized, like everything else about war, and is being waged against the American public.
When you own a media presence that can respond to the conditioning meme of the day, and pound day by day, the “unreality” that you’d like to see made into reality, it is not surprising that you succeed. What is surprising is that so many intelligent people get blindly swept up in the lemming charge to the cliff. Consider how the scientific fact of global warming has been morphed into an ideological test, with reality being pushed into the far corner and forced to wear a dunce’s hat if it pipes up for any reason.
To consider the fundamental insanity of what we are being fed on Day One of 2011 (or, as I’ll be calling it, Liveblogging the Apocalypse™) let us consider a news item of equal weight and heft:
Imagine today’s headline: NOTHING BAD HAPPENED YESTERDAY.
With the breathless lede: “For the first time in memory, no bad news was reported in the United States. “
On the editorial pages and on the airwaves, the contrarians jump on it:
- Alexander Cockburn – The Great Right Wing Conspiracy to Suppress Bad News
- Ann Coulter – No bad news, another liberal plot to commit treason against Jesus.
- Michelle Malkin – No bad news is NOT good news, especially when it’s LIBERAL no bad news.
- Daily Kos diarist – No bad news just the first harbinger of media censorship as net neutrality vanishes
- Charles Krauthammer – Isn’t this the time to abolish police and fire unions?
- Paul Krugman – Is good news bad for the economy?
- Rush Limbaugh – The phony “no bad news” story from the drive by media
- Sean Hannity – Mee Too
- Megan Kelly on Faux Nooz™: “Some are criticizing President Obama for the lack of bad news, contending that this is part of the liberal war on media. Coming up on Glenn Beck, Glenn explains the connections between the international communist conspiracy, government socialism and the protocols of the elders of zion™ in the run up to this suspicious lack of news.”
And the no bad news day dominates the news cycle for three or four days afterwards, like a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, fueling itself with all that hot air.
If you think that I’m exaggerating, consider the puffed up news cycle when Barbara Walters interviewed President Obama, and this page on Memeorandum:
Evidently, as reported yesterday, James Dobson has found his “American Margaret Thatcher” — as he was reportedly looking for — and the push for Palin is on. This kind of news coverage doesn’t happen without a lot of planning, and a continuous series of publicity stunts that P.T. Barnum would envy.
Now, you might wonder how such a defective product could be marketed to a cynical public. But consider that some of our best advertising campaigns were based on nothing at all. Recall that famous Miller campaign, where the admen could find no hook, until touring a bottling plant, and the adman sees that they’re steaming the bottles, and he asks about it, and is told that everybody does that, but comes up with the incredibly successful campaign that nobody dare emulate: ”Miller bottles cleaned with LIVE STEAM!”
Or Coors selling the COLDNESS of its beer. (A factor which, it must be admitted, Coors has NOTHING TO DO WITH WHATSOEVER.)
We sell crap based on nothing at all all the time. How else do you explain Chia Pets®?
When you don’t have the facts on your side, frame the debate in an insane manner. This is nothing new. Remember how the debate in the 1988 Presidential election was about the pledge of allegiance, that Dukakis was a ‘card carrying member of the ACLU’ and that black Willie Horton raped and murdered white women at the behest of Michael Dukakis? (That was the message to the reptile brain, not the literal transcript.)
So, expect to see a lot of instantaneous coverage of Sarah Palin for any reason whatsoever. But never think that it isn’t planned, and that there isn’t a purpose to that equation. They’ve got TWO YEARS to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and it only took them one to convince the most successful congress since the 1960s to run scared and defensive against a ‘movement’ presented by CNN as a tour bus rented by an old-line GOP shop in Sacramento who’s been running the same stunt with the same players since at least 2005.
So ask not why the Sarah headlines roil. They roil for thee.
Menopausal Hippies
Rocker
2011 will be a big year for snark and humbug, I predict. The generational wars began in earnest this morning with the Alzheimer’s Association float in the Rose Parade taking the President’s Trophy for best use of flowers, with an Alzheimer’s locomotive and a reminder that the first of the baby boom generation retires today. 1945.
Aside from the bizarre reptile brain message they’re sending (“A freight train of hippies with Alzheimer’s Disease is coming down the track”) we DO have that sudden bulge of demographics being paid Social Security and Medicare by much less populous generations succeeding them. As they were fleeced of their retirement nesteggs by the two great stock market “bubbles” of the Aughts, look for the snark to rise to fever pitch to cut their Social Security, lower their Medicare, raise the age of retirement and “privatize” Social Security so that those people who profited from the last two bubbles can scoop up another generation’s cash and interest.
And, 2011 should be a big year to push “school choice,” having just about completely wrecked the public school system (say, you don’t suppose that the decline can be directly related to the takeovers of school boards nationwide by the religious right, starting in the early 1980s, do you? I mean it DID manage to make evolution “controversial,” and taught them how to use the same tactics to make “global warming” “controversial, after all). The Art Robinsons are pushing cheap home schooling, while the private schools are lining up for all that good government voucher cash, and their union-free environment, where teachers have no rights and can be told to teach anything the private schoolmasters decree and be let go for any reason. Once we get the uppityness out of education, THEN we can advance as a nation, right?
And segregation can continue, as it has, at the pre-Brown v. Board of Education levels of 1954.
“Scho0l Choice” is a big part of the “Tea Party” agenda, even if they don’t realize it yet.
Any other snark?
Well, we can expect the usual crypto-racist bilge, as the Angry White Men stew and fume at their prohibition of spelling ‘negro’ with two ‘g’s, or even with an ‘o,’ or a ‘g.’*
[* Neither letter is found in "African American," or "Black."]
And the toxic hate speak against “liberals” who have morphed into “leftists” when “liberal” lost its punchy cachet within a long, guttural sneer.
And the usual hatred of foreigners, “illegal aliens,” Muslims, and Jews.
But there will be, undoubtedly some NEW thing to hate in 2011, and that or those are, as master military strategist Donald Rumsfeld used to say, unknown unknowns.
And that’s your 2011 forecast for “The Year In Snark.”
Courage.
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UPDATE 8:14 PST (RIFF RAMM BAH ZOO – GO TCU!) : The snark has begun, as predicted. This just showed up on Memeorandum (although it is self-dated Dec. 31). From the hoary pages of the New York Times (not entirely sure I used the correct spelling in this case):
Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65
In keeping with a generation’s fascination with itself, the time has come to note the passing of another milestone: On New Year’s Day, the oldest members of the Baby Boom Generation will turn 65, the age once linked to retirement, early bird specials and gray Velcro shoes that go with everything….
REPORTING or snark?
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