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4000
That number, meaningless though it is, (it is one more than 3999, 1000 more than 3000, 1000 less than 5000, 10 less than 4010, which we should hit next week...) has caused such a firestorm on blogs (the number of threads shouting 4000! and then "OMG, how sad!" responses here was appalling), newspapers, cable news, etc. is illustrative of how pathetically shallow and malleable the populace is.
The firestorm over Rev. Wright's comments is another. The crap about the "snub" is another. And on, and on, and on.
Very few Americans are aware, day to day, of the deaths and maimings to their fellow citizens and to Iraqis. Only if their reverie about March Madness or whether they can afford a new car or their sick kid or... is interrupted by a shouted headline do they grant the subject a brief bit of attention. Like a tropical fish tank that some kid has slapped to see some action, they dash frantically back and forth for a few minutes, then settle down and get back to the daily routine.
Maybe if it is a kid on their block they hang out some flags and ribbon and say "I am so sorry for your loss."
There are 488 dead Americans so far in Afghanistan plus three still unreported that are likely to be Americans, since it was an IED that killed four at once and one was from Norfolk, Va. Many more from other NATO countries. That war is going backwards. The puppet government has no control over the countryside, and the Taliban is resurgent. How much publicity do we see about this, the original "war on terror?"
Blame "the media" if you wish, but stories about runaway brides and American Idol get the ratings, and nobody calls the media out for ignoring Afghanistan, and that oft-referenced but never sought bogeyman, OBL. Biden did, for all the good it did him.
There are four Americans MIA in Iraq. One was reported executed but the DoD said the video is "inconclusive" and continues to list him as DUSTWUN (duty status whereabouts unknown) rather than KIA. In other words, he is AWOL. Two others were captured last summer with a third whose body was found in a river; no trace has ever been found of them. They are AWOL too. So really the 4000 number was hit several days earlier (as if it mattered). But what the heck, it was published, so all the horns and whistles went off like it was 12 midnight on New Year's.
The rate of deaths and maimings dropped off last fall, from a high of over 3 deaths per day to about one now. And the media declared that Iraq is no longer an issue to the populace. So the populace dutifully began reporting in polls that Iraq was lower priority than the economy, or healthcare, or whatever else Big Brother wanted the populace to think.
So then a round number occurs and it becomes the news of the day, as if nobody died last week.
OK, enough about the DoD numbers and back to the main point. The electorate is so malleable, and the media so complicit, that nothing can stop it. If Big Brother wanted to put the Tazmanian Devil in the Oval Office, he could. Our form of government "Of the People" is history. They want a senile doofus to serve as the new Oz while we ignore the cabal behind the curtain, and they'll get it. They picked Nixon as their boy in 1960, and that upstart Catholic with the Boston accent stunned them. There were people still thinking back then, and they thought that JFK's stirring rhetoric sounded pretty damned good, and they wanted the kind of nation he seemed to want to build. And of those who did not vote for him, many were won over soon enough by his inaugural and other speeches. He showed some inexperience w/respect to the Bay of Pigs, but more than made up for that later with the Missile Crisis. It looked like maybe the country was heading in a good direction - efforts toward civil rights, fighting poverty, putting a man on the moon - really the American Dream starting to unfold, or at least appearing possible. We were involved in VN, but not up to our eyeballs, and maybe would have taken a hint from the French and backed off.
Then came Nov. 22, 1963, LBJ, 1968 Dem convention, Nixon, Watergate, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush... and here we are. During that time they made sure that the electorate would never again ignore their wishes and elect someone who wanted to go a different direction. They developed "sound bites" and "Spin" and "tastes great/less filling" and "no child left behind." They managed to convince the generation just after mine (the one that thought JFK was pretty damned cool, and protested VN) that materialism was the new religion, and the "Me Generation" was born. Getting rich through scams like the S&L debacle, MCI, ENRON, etc. became the measure of real success. And now we have the subprime mortgage version of the same. They cranked out MBAs who insisted that the "one-minute-elevator-pitch" was all that was necessary to explain an issue to management. They taught that an actual explanation in complete sentences was too much detail - everything had to be bulleted lists in PowerPoint. They introduced "management by objective" wherein workers are given "goalsheets" with "metrics" and management then sits back with arms folded waiting to slam them for failure at their review, withold raises and bonuses, instead of actually managing. Imagine a basketball coach doing that! So workers find ways, just like the teachers dealing with NCLB, to "work the numbers."
Reality is meaningless. Just work the metrics, get your bonus, buy your Beamer.
Those really successful at this becomes multibillionairres, and the rest can go pound sand.
They are Big Brother. They are manipulating 300 million people. They ring a bell, the people salivate. Just in case the ongoing carnage might regain traction as an election issue, they hype the unholy crap out of a meaningless number, get all 300 million all stirred up for about twelve hours, then let them settle back to business as usual. Get it out of their systems, like a seventh-inning stretch. They won't pay attention again until 5000.
Only one thing has a snowball's chance in hell of stopping this. An election like JFK's would be a good start. But sadly, I hold out little hope of that happening. Times are far too different. They know the risk is there, and they will be far more thorough in their manipulations. They got caught off guard by new technology, when Nixon looked like hell in the TV debates and JFK was charming. They won't be caught off guard again. They will push buttons, pull strings, hype stories, and turn McCain into the Second Coming while painting Barack Obama as evil incarnate. People will stumble to the polls mumbling "I gotta vote against the terrists," fully believing that Obama was born in a cave in Afghanistan, the spawn of OBL and a goat or something.
What stands a chance is an election unlike any other. The Obama supporters across the country, and democrats who would have preferred some other candidate, MUST create a peaceful "new American revolution". We need activism. No name-calling, no vitriol, not another 1968 convention. We need people singing "We Shall Overcome" and the like. We need a Woodstock, we need a Poor People's March, we need large enough groups of people - middleaged white people with short hair, alongside neo-hippies, and hispanics, blacks, factory workers, farmers, you name it, to get out and demonstrate. I mean crowds where it is impossible to estimate accurately. We need a theme of "We The People" want our country back!
Here's the thing: They have successfully created this mass-hypnotism phenomenon wherein the populace willingly believes the truth of the moment. They have their media to disseminate that "truth." We need to drown it out. We need SO MANY of us marching, demonstrating, not specifically for a candidate, but AGAINST their tactics - Diebold, talkradio, whatever, that the "conventional wisdom" starts to become "don't trust anybody on the inside"
I think the skepticism is out there, but complacency keeps it bottled up. We need to fire people up. Get them saying "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more."
If all we do is attempt to play by their rules, we will have President McCain. We will march along in self-delusion thinking that we are actually participating in an "election", like we did in 2000 and 2004.
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