'The debate' wasn't about politics so stop freaking out; look deeper into the shadows

vol. 6 issue 10

Greetings,

You know I dropped out of the American media echo chamber. I tell you all the time. But occasionally, I listen to the BBC, which is how I got Radio 2’s wrap-up of the debate. The shrillness of the morning show host and his guests signaled panic in the UK, or at least among their media types, about how we Yanks are no longer inching toward the collapse of our democracy, but are racing headlong, ass in hands, for it.

I got the sense that, for the BBC at least, the back-and-forth between these two old American men who sound like they’re stroking out every time they speak, arguing over who has the better golf handicap, and the inability of our current president to remember what his handicap is, right after he said it, and all at a time when we and the UK are involved in two theaters of war, it was so frightening, it took the BBC talkers beyond condescension and straight into shock.

It got my attention.

Who’s in charge here?

So, I went looking into the spectacle that was the debate, listened to clips (eek), and noted on social media how utterly out of their minds about it many Democrats are about it. Lots of emotion.

Then I came across a conspiratorial report by an ancient muckraker (he’s 87), Seymour Hersh. He reports that the debate, which was the earliest ever in an American election, was a test by those who surround the president to determine whether to table Biden’s candidacy or keep up the puppetry. Ergo, Hersh asks, just who is running the country?

He also posed the question as to whether the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked posthaste in order to do Biden damage control. Calm down. Sip your drink.

Hersh is celebrated or hated — it depends on your take — for his unwillingness to ever cite his sources. He is notable for having won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 as a freelancer (meaning he did not have the deep bench of lawyers behind him or any other kinds of resources a staff reporter would have had) for his coverage for the New York Times of the cover up of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, coverage that essentially ruined any further attempts by the US to fool the public that the war was above board.

I have it on the inside that a lot of his peers, those who still are alive, remember him as arrogant and boastful. I get the sense he’s not well liked. Maybe. I have never met him. Reporters who are my peers and younger also take a squinty view of him. They were flummoxed by Hersh’s reporting back in 2017 that Trump is not a Russian asset.

I also rejected his reporting then. But now that I observe the feds’ milquetoast approach to prosecuting the ex-prez-probably-next-prez for anything meaningful (hush money to a porn star is not meaningful in the context of everything else), I am rethinking that. After all, there is also reporting that Trump is an FBI asset.

Others still are irritated by Hersh’s reporting that we, as in the US, blew up the Nordstream pipeline. That to me was a no duh (who else had the motive and the means, and secret meetings with the German chancellor?) even if the chatterers including Snopes can’t get on board.

Increasingly, whenever I do peek out from my non-news bubble, I find Hersh is the only one in the US media willing to ask the obvious questions. He clearly is not worried about fitting into any proscribed rubric. (If you know others, send me their links!)

I think “Who is running the country?” is an obvious question. For some time now, I have been suspicious of just who is actually setting policy from the top. That occurred to me long before Biden forgot his golf handicap, especially when, as a former denizen of Washington who had to interact with the wonks and willies on the Hill, I noticed the pander factor zoom off the charts. Who and what the heck was everyone so scared of? I never was sure. I knew it wasn’t the president, Obama or Trump.

Maybe the last time the leader we thought was in charge was indeed the one actually in charge was Eisenhower. Can anyone credibly argue that his stark warning, made as he exited the White House in January 1961, has not materialized? Namely, that we as a nation were at risk of falling prey to the aims of what was then nascent, but which is now firmly entrenched, military-industrial complex, the power of which, he warned, would surpass that of our elected leaders.

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” he said. Persist it does.

Mind you, the military itself is secretive, but the defense contractors are both military and industry. In other words, don’t automatically blame the generals.

Dark = private: private = power grab

Let’s pull up for a bird’s eye view for a moment.

The secret sucking up of control over as much of the world’s resources as is happening currently by private equity firms, a tiny group of mostly men who have the kind of consolidated power never before seen on this planet, piques my curiosity. What are they apparently so scared of that they have to resort to hoarding much of the world’s wealth and resources, and then keeping secret all that they have hoarded? And ultimately, doesn’t all that power ultimately tie in with the military-industry sorts, especially the market for surveillance?

Yes, is the answer.

And who are they surveilling? They might be spying on each other, but from my perspective, nah. It looks more like they collaborate with one another, and have done since, oh, 2008. That was a vintage year, you might remember.

They’re keeping tabs on us.

So much about the current state of the world makes no sense if your goal is to lead. But if your aim is control, then whose aims do inflation, war, and political chaos serve? For example, when you dig a little and learn that international financiers own a staggering amount of agricultural land in Ukraine — 9 million hectares and counting, about a third of arable land — you might ask, what do they plan to do with that power to feed us (or not feed us)? How is the Ukraine war helping their interests?

The shadow bros

These shadow beings, the private equity bros who never tell you what they are up to or why, they just do it and then release a media advisory glorifying their latest purchase of, I mean contributions to society, are also sucking up as many media properties as they can, as fast as they can.

Here’s a startling spreadsheet of the 21 companies that own the American media landscape. Here’s a graphic of media ownership maps that is slightly out of date, but still accurate in that the effect is the same: what we see is a fistful of men tightly controlling our media outlets, and thus what we see and hear. And remember, the men in the pictures are backed by men not in the picture, about 14 of them who run PE firms globally.

There is a correlation between the incessant corporate media imprinting on our brains and the destruction of silence, too. We are firehosed with messaging everywhere. Like, who’s the genius that thought of adding audio ads and “helpful hints” to the gas pump? The less we have of peace with our own thoughts, the more we fill our heads with the messages delivered to and imprinted on us.

You can’t form your own opinions if you don’t have time to think and observe. Too many of us think we think for ourselves, when in reality we’re regurgitating received thinking. Put another way, we’re manipulated into a simulation of life.

But I think we are starting to shake out of our stupor. The world feels too imperiled to us at the collective level now, and it’s getting harder to control our focus. Not impossible, however. Shit shows like the debate still sell plenty of seats.

Still, I wonder if it is possible that what these secrecy freaks know, and what we have yet to grasp at the political and social levels, is that they are losing power.

The corporate media’s narrative is increasingly frenzied; it is so divorced from the reality the rest of us are experiencing — certainly the reality that is possible when you unplug from the blah blah — that the cognitive dissonance generated looks deliberate and is a giveaway there are interests incongruent to our own as a collective.

Mythology not ideology

Why would they be losing power? I think because we are living beyond and outside of the old paradigm that held secrecy sacred in order to maintain a top-down system. We have pictures of outer space now. We know we’re not so contained. We have the technology to condense thought into light and send it instantaneously around the globe. It is harder to cast spells of mass enchantment than it used to be, although given all the freak-out around the debate, I would say there remain many of us who are still easily duped into thinking that what these two geezers have to say actually matters. More likely, as Hersh had the temerity to suggest — there are others in charge.

Will we ever know for sure if that is so and who is hiding behind the office? Yes, I think so. Perhaps not in the next few years, maybe not in our lifetime, but I think it’s inevitable. Truth will out, as has been said. But more so, what I see is that we are on a precipice of breakthrough to something truly democratic, not the current top-down “marketplace” version of democratic, and that is why this nonsense will come to light.

We are the new Gutenberg Bible

The power of Gutenberg’s Bible wasn’t that it brought the word of God to the people; it was that it made those in power accountable to the people. It democratized the Word. The papacy and its coterie couldn’t just make shit up and say that if you didn’t obey them, you were at their mercy. Now the oppressed had access to the tools of oppression and could judge for themselves.

Are we not also on the verge of collectively understanding that we don’t need these rich weirdsmobiles controlling the means to life on Earth? Even if you’re addicted to [insert name of info stream here], you must know at some level that the patriarchal hierarchy and all its implications are meaningless now. It’s a simulacrum of centuries, nothing more. The present doesn’t look like the past and the future is utterly unsustainable if the past is what we carry forward.

And if you don’t already know and live that, you probably are a smug True Believer and hate everyone but your own little clique.

Which is why the debate is utterly meaningless. It was a box theater production for calculating men behind the curtain to test theories while too many of the rest of us became hysterical over the production. Take another sip.

What I am saying is that the debate is a pantomime of the old myths. We have moved beyond these dumb, limiting plays. They served a purpose once. Now they have no meaning.

What we face in this country now isn’t political. It’s mythical. We need new myths. Then we will have new politics. We don’t need a top-down approach to life when we know now that there is life beyond us in the galaxy. That knowledge alone obliterates any more linear thinking nonsense. Why keep up this Punch and Judy show?

We are Gutenberg’s Bible, folks. We are. That’s what “they” are scared of us. There’s .01 of them. There’s 99.9 of us. And left to our own devices, we figure shit out just fine. Now that outer space has opened up, we might still like the idea of our off-planet Daddy God with an epic beard, because it’s familiar. But use your imagination — we need new stories to keep up with what’s actually happening.

I am not panning grace and mercy, but I certainly am poking at fantasy.

You, not them, have the power

There is work to do down here on Earth, and we’re the ones doing it. Not Beardy God. Not Aphrodite or Hera. Not the UN. Not the IMF. Not Wall Street. Certainly not our pandering legislators. Us, you and me, and our associates. If anything that needed to get done in your sphere actually was accomplished, ask yourself, who got it done? And your answer will be you did, or someone you know. Do you really need to worry about what is happening anywhere else? Can you do anything about it besides worry? And does some Boomer on Capitol Hill really know what your community needs?

If we don’t need Daddy God to get things done for us, then we don’t need President Daddy, God’s proxy, either. Not in the way we’ve had such an arrangement before. Democracy can look different with a new structure of belief. I’m not saying God is dead, I’m saying our myths about “him” are.

We are Gutenberg’s Bible, folks. We are different. The digital age didn’t just empower the bros. It coincides with our own evolution, our further enlightenment.

What you believe is true is what will shape your actions. If you believe you need a Daddy God, sure looks to me like these bros are assembling to give you one, boy howdy. The next decade is gonna hurt. We are going to find out real soon what all this amassing of resources was planned for.

What is the point of all that power? I don’t see a glorious endgame to it. Are the bros so sick in the head they don’t care if their bids for control are also zero-sum games like nuclear war? (That’s the part that weirds me out and why I end up contemplating bizarre sci-fi scenarios like maybe they don’t care if they destroy humanity and the Earth because they aren’t human and have an exit plan from Earth. But I digress.)

Last sip

I have more questions than answers, but I am utterly convinced the debate was irrelevant. What matters is paying closer attention to who might be benefitting from all the chaos and finding ways not to participate in it. I think the more stories we adopt about light and transparency, about our own strengths and capacities to do new things, not build tanks or drones, and the less we let the media tell us what we think and believe, the sooner we will create a mythological current that contravenes the status quo that has not accounted for itself.

We have to start sooner than later; I do expect the next decade to be unlike any we’ve ever known or imagined. That power they’ve been gathering is going to be unleashed like an atom bomb. It might even be in the form of an atom bomb. Whatever transpires, we will need each other more than ever.

It’s powerful to challenge the thoughts we accept at face value. They might be myths used to control us. If we’re distracted by the spectacle, we won’t notice the power grab happening. At the very least, ask yourself if what you know is what you took the time to know for yourself.

Enjoy the rest of your beverage.

Peace,

Whitney

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