Speed

by Carol Schiffler

I get my daily dose of propaganda from AM Talk Radio. I am a captive audience, relying as I do, on the traffic reports which are the life-blood of every long-distance commuter. And nobody does traffic like the spin doctors on Talk Radio. Every ten minutes during rush hour, morning and afternoon, the traffic reports – like Eichmann’s boxcars – always arrive on time.

The “news,” of course, is a ludicrous hand job – nine minutes of government-approved pablum, delivered at a lightening-fast pace, cleverly sliced with advertisements, and falsely labeled “in-depth team coverage.” Talk Radio news reports are as cheerfully misleading as the nurse who comes to the ailing patient with a needle the size of Topeka and says, “Now you may feel a little discomfort…” But they serve the needs of the homeland power brokers nicely, as all good propaganda does, breeding both ignorance and arrogance into the listeners in equal measure. Never mind the fact that Talk Radio consumers were never told of Dick Cheney’s refusal to hand over the papers from the secret energy meetings.

Never mind the fact that they were never informed that Osama bin Laden and the CIA were once as close as two giggling teenagers on Lover’s Lane. Never mind the fact that they do not hear the dissent of their fellow conservatives who have taken the Bush administration to task for both its assault on civil liberties and its Middle Eastern misadventures. According to the numerous syndicated talk show hosts, their listeners are the best and brightest and most well-informed people on the planet, and never mind the man behind the curtain.

The programming format, of course, is the velvet hammer behind the message. While effective propaganda relies heavily on selective reporting, subtle innuendo and, in the case of visual media, carefully crafted imagery, the 21st century propagandist has a tool at his, (or her), disposal that would make Stalin and Hitler green with envy. That tool is speed, and Talk Radio wields it with cunning. Rapid and fragmented delivery virtually ensures the success of The Big Lie, as it disconnects the consumer, not only from historical context, but from linked current events as well.

Take the recent appointment of Jerry Regier to head of the Florida Department of Children and Families, for example. On the morning after the announcement, local Talk Radio stations played a sound bite from a DCF official praising the governor’s selection of Regier and making reference to the fact that it certainly was a wonderful idea to have the police do all the investigative work on DCF child abuse cases. After all, the police are well-trained investigators of bad stuff, while your average social worker is not. They dropped this bombshell and then moved on, with no mention of the fact that Regier had not even been vetted by the Florida legislature yet, nor did they offer any context for the DCF official’s statement. For all we know, she might have ended her statement with, “but we really have some serious reservations about it.”

It was one of those all too frequent surreal moments in broadcasting, and one which screamed “one step closer to a police state” to those of us who are easily alarmed by such things. But setting aside the paranoia aspect for just a moment, connect this report to another released earlier this year which suggested that the local police departments were already understaffed and overwhelmed by a boatload of new anti-terrorism duties, courtesy of the federal government. Now there is the implication of that they will be taking on yet another task, one so daunting that it could not even be successfully performed by the alphabet soup agency that was designed to perform it in the first place. Who will be out there fighting crime, if the police are too busy doing the job of the FBI and the DCF to tend to the bank robbers and serial killers? Will those duties now fall to the Neighborhood Nazi – oops, I mean Neighborhood Watch – Associations?

So – and stay with me here – what you could conceivably wind up with is the poorly trained Neighborhood Watch Associations fighting crime so that the police can do the investigative work of the poorly trained DCF workers who, for all we know, are doing the job of the poorly trained county health workers who are currently pinch-hitting for the Yankees, since our fearless leader has mandated that, no matter what else is going on in the world, there will be baseball.

The end result of most bureaucratic ideas takes the form of an entire roll of toilet paper circling a conduit that is way too small, but if you are expecting to get the 20,000 foot view from listening to Talk Radio news reports, don't hold your breath. It is in the best interest of the self-perpetuating bureaucratic big-wigs to ensure that you only remember that the nice official from the DCF said that police investigations of DCF abuse cases are a wonderful idea, and by extension Jerry Regier is a wonderful man, and by extension Jeb Bush who appointed him is also wonderful, and ultimately yes, George Bush is the source of All Good Things. Please do not trouble yourself with the details or the context, and on to the next sound bite. Have you heard about the new product that eliminates irregularity while fighting cavities?

Speed.

Speed is what allows the American public to transition from hating Osama bin Laden to hating Saddam Hussein without missing a beat. In the months following September 11, AM talk show hosts could not go for more than five minutes without invoking the gods to rain wrath upon the head of Osama bin Laden. There were parody songs, there were sound clips from Bush’s latest speech, (complete with echo effects on macho words like “kill” and “destroy”), there was talk of resolve and revenge. Today, bin Laden has been forgotten. Today, if his name is brought up at all, it is only when it is unavoidable and then it is uttered with the same awkward embarrassment that one uses when discussing a relative who has a penchant for diddling little boys. Today, the same sound clips and parody songs are played, but the name of the evil-doer-in-chief has been changed to “Saddam Hussein.” And nobody notices. Where is the in-depth team coverage that allows us to ponder how George Bush went from, “Osama is wanted, dead or alive,” to “I don't know where he is and I don't care,” in less than a year? History is being erased before our very eyes at a speed which does not invite contemplation.

Thus, incidents like the “Gulf of Tonkin Lie” which, in the end, resulted in years of death and destruction, can be trotted out each August and reported as a new and startling fact, although we have heard it – and forgotten it – every year for the last decade. The Bay of Pigs and the sinking of the Maine are not even blips on the screen of our collective memory. No one can relate Vietnam to what is currently taking place in the Middle East, although the parallels are blatant and the pattern all too familiar. One imagines presidential speech writers pulling up Lyndon Johnson’s addresses to the nation in the early Vietnam years, and merely doing a global search and replace on the word processor in order to magically transform Johnson into Bush and North Vietnam into Iraq. Who would know?

Perhaps the global elites have overplayed their hand, though. As September 11 approaches and Talk Radio hosts go to their audience to elicit suggestions as to how they should package the event, the answers they are receiving are not always what they expect to hear. On a recent call-in show, a small percentage of listeners flatly stated that they were sick of hearing about the whole thing and that they sincerely hoped that the host would do nothing to dredge it all back up again in 2002. Given the fact that callers to these shows are rigorously screened for right-thinking attitudes, it was a relatively startling phenomenon.

On another occasion, the same host tried to drum up opposition to the Hooters takeover of defunct Vanguard airlines. Flying in post-September 11 America should be approached as cautiously as one would a rabid animal, and please remain terrified at all times. No dice, responded his audience, almost unanimously. After waiting in excruciatingly long lines that terminate in humiliating searches by over-zealous security guards, who the hell wouldn't want to fly Hooters Air? Even the women callers were ready for hot wings, cold beer and a healthy dose of airborne Bacchanalia.

It’s the speed, you see. The same process that the controllers have used to keep us focused only on things that benefit their current agenda has prevented us from focusing on – well – anything at all. The process they have used to create an over-stimulated and easily bored consumer is the same process we use to consign September 11 to the memory hole, along with the Gulf of Tonkin, the sinking of the Maine, and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There will be plenty of flag-waving piety to go around on September 11, 2002. And no one will overtly dissent or question it, as that would be bad form. But I am willing to bet that there will be countless folks who just stay home and go about their business that day, and by this time next year, the number of September 11 party-poopers will have doubled.

There is a humorous scene from the movie “Airplane” which encapsulates the state of our consumer-driven, priority-challenged society. In this scene, the passengers have just been informed that, in addition to imminent doom, the airline has just run out of coffee. The lack of coffee, of course, is the information that incites the hapless travelers to riot. Plane crashes and hijackings are one thing, but inconvenience will not be tolerated.

The propagandists have deliberately sought to create a nation of people who cannot put two and two together and come up with four. They have manipulated the media into presenting news as entertainment and entertainment as news, so that the undiscriminating consumer need never contemplate stark reality or ruminate on the boring relationships of cause and effect. They have created a society which cannot even conceive of desire without concurrent instant gratification. In short, they have created a Super-Consumer, and a nation thus conditioned has no sense of history, no conscience and no perspective, thus leaving the global elites to their killing and controlling unchallenged by popular opinion.

But the planet will not fall into the cabal’s hands in half an hour, give or take a commercial break. We are already growing bored with the Middle East and George has not even gotten around to conquering those nasty savages in the Far East.

For those of us who oppose the endless Orwellian wars of the Bush cabal, the short attention span of our fellow citizens has been an endless source of discouragement. Why can't we get people to focus, to empathize with people who have no more control over their leaders than we have over ours? Why can they not see the parallels between the “War on Terror” and the hideous bloodbath that was Vietnam? Why can they not see the similarity between the words uttered by George Bush in the Year of our Lord 2002 and the words of Adolf Hitler in pre-war Nazi Germany? To date, our pleas and wake-up calls have fallen on the deaf ears of a nation that suffers from severe collective attention deficit disorder.

In the end, though, the trick may be to use the global elite’s lean, mean brainwashing machine against itself. If the sight of starving and dismembered Afghani children does not move them to action, perhaps another form of persuasion would be more useful – one which better suits the pre-programmed neurons of a nation that is hooked on satisfaction.

Hot wings and cold beer anyone? And oh, by the way, have you heard about the new product that guarantees firmer thighs while putting an end to war? It’s called a protest march.