Category Archives: Agitprop/Propaganda

The Name of This Band Is Barking Heads

    National media actually titled the squall the Obama administration brushed off in mid-May “Scandal Week.” Wonderful. Brain cramps even infected the nation’s reputable information arbiters. What else could’ve sunk the country’s “scandal” threshold below curb height?  Continue reading The Name of This Band Is Barking Heads

The Whole Shooting Match

    Let’s hope the president was just being cynical when he tossed in video games and movies as perhaps energizing America’s gun nut culture. Pop culture does not incite mindless violence. Simple-minded adulation? Yes. Boy bands prove that.

    Fads that draw double takes such as severe serial tattooing and Marquis de Sade piercing? Certainly. Just in case carnival midways run short of, oh, geeks.

    But the force behind lapses into updates of the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays”? Uh, no. Continue reading The Whole Shooting Match

America Dismisses Mr. Charlie


    The United States is fortunate Barack Obama retained her presidency. His tone deaf, brain encased in amber opponent, Mitt Romney, would’ve been the perfect wooden Indian for Corporate America.
    
    In Romney, the grandees and high-flyers lording throughout boardrooms had their soul mate. That is supposing they possessed souls. This horde gives form and substance to Balzac’s quote stating “behind every great fortune is a great crime.” Continue reading America Dismisses Mr. Charlie

Before Hiroshima


    August 6th has become a date receiving outsized attention. Aesthetically that’s quite understandable. Hiroshima offers superior visuals to Pearl Harbor, a site whose tragedy lies beneath a placid surface.


    Pearl Harbor simply offers serene contemplation across Hawaiian waves. Hiroshima city fathers have done an artful job of propagandizing their preservations. Japanese ruins deflect guilt from the past. What incited 1941 America is mostly out of sight underwater and left to explanation. Continue reading Before Hiroshima

The New Brickburners


    Most of us should be supporting the protesters involved with the Occupy Wall Street actions. If not taking to Lower Manhattan streets, breaking our arches and straining our voices alongside them.

    Naturally money compels the protest’s basis. One would’ve preferred more purely motivated impulses. Yet as the late Reverend Ike preached, “Money makes the world go round.”

    Since life and death barely budge us from our daily numbness, it must be money. Continue reading The New Brickburners

Making Hash

    Strange. The fiscal shenanigans across these weeks involving the federal budget and stock market have silenced the usual yammering about privatizing social security. 

    Right now you’d need Sherpas, guide dogs, map, compass, and Diogenes to find one Jim Jones favored Kool-Aid drinker who’d demand plumping the stock market with social security money. 

    I wonder where they’ve all gone. Maybe gravity scared them away. 

    Given the market’s seemingly unceasing rise, I guess they’d forgotten a basic physics tenet as applied to economics: what goes up must come down. 

    August’s thud and splat must’ve been one harsh remedial lesson. Continue reading Making Hash

Funhouse Mirrors

 

    Miss crushing deadlines as I do, there is one benefit being a newspaper racket casualty. No need to fake objectivity. I can now voice opinions without caring who’s offended.

    I didn’t grovel before and I’ll damn well clean clocks now.

    During March, too many journalists have jumped on the Libyan War bandwagon. Somehow the United States’ North African involvement constitutes our third conflict with a Muslim country.

    Has it come to that? Dropping ordnance and enforcing internationally recognized sanctions against a rogue nation count as war? It’s an intervention. Libyans themselves are doing the real fighting and killing. American press misinterpretation crosses between lax writing and lazy thinking.

    Since President Obama’s installation, there’s been way too much brain-dead, knee-jerk, pack-following. Compare Libya and Kosovo, and see Barack Obama as a darker, cooler Bill Clinton and the word “war” never enters circulation.

    Unsurprisingly, I support this administration. Adults are in charge and they’re behaving in a conscientious manner. Americans haven’t enjoyed such high-level contemplation since the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. Continue reading Funhouse Mirrors