This post started out as a response to a reply made by Real History Lisa on something that I wrote commenting upon Booman’s great article on the CIA/Power Elite From the Memory Hole. (Read that article if you have not. You really should.)
I had written:
The only startling thing is that most of the people of the United States do NOT know this.
History…if there ever is such a thing again by the time these monsters get though fucking around…will describe the story of the U.S. from the time of Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex” speech right through whatever bloody denouement eventually comes to pass as the crookedest period of time ever in the history of the world.
Richelieu et al writ larger than it is possible to conceive.
And the sleeple of the United States just snored right on through it, put to sleep by the power of the burgeoning Disinformation Age.
Shame on us all.
We stood up too late.
And too few.
And Lisa had replied:
Was there ever an age that was NOT a disinformation age?
My long and thorough answer to this important question appears below.
Lisa…
There has never been an age where disinformation was so effectively propagated in the minds of the masses.
Technology and its progressively more complete ownership and control by corporate interests has closed the heretofore effective and necessary cracks in the wall of universal disinformation that have historically allowed new information…new ideas, regenerative concepts…to creep into the consciousness of the people.
I have seen this happen quite clearly in my own field of American music, and in the spirit of “As above, so below” it is quite plain to me that what I have seen is simply a microcosmic view of what is happening the world over.
Yes, you are right. There has never been an age that was not a disinformation age. Disinformation is how elites maintain their power. Their rule. Power elites, church elites, hereditary elites…throughout history they have pounded their various control stories into the people of the cultures that they dominated.
The divine right of kings to rule, the iron laws of every degenerated religion ever to become an orthodoxy, the “chosen people” memes that hold together races…pound pound pound pound pound pound pound, they have been forced into the lives of the great, scuffling masses of people.
But always…ALWAYS…there have been holes in that wall of bullshit. Cracks through which leaked REAL information that changed things. Ideas that moderated and challenged the predominant flood of negative, degenerated information and allowed society and humankind to evolve.
NEVER has there been a propaganda apparatus so strong and so successfully wielded as the one that is in effect in the United States and the rest of the overdeveloped world.
Never.
Not Roman Catholicism.
Not Nazism.
Nothing.
The current control mechanism closes those cracks. Only the internet remains as a place where a free flow of information remains.
And watch out.
We’re next.
Bet on it.
(China knows…)
Please look at the so-called bebop revolution of the mid-’40s through the late ’60s in America for a glimpse at how the cracks worked.
“Jazz” (Whatever THAT word really means.)…a product of the black ex-slave society and its interactions with western cultures in the urban societies of America in the late 1800s/early 1900s…had blossomed and spread itself throughout almost all of American society by the early ’40s. It was the musical lingua franca of the culture, to be heard in diluted forms behind commercials on the radio, as pop and dance music, as movie background music. It was EVERYWHERE.
And it was going NOWHERE. It was not evolving very much, because it had become an orthodoxy. A caricature of itself. You pumped the various melodic, harmonic and rhythmic concepts of “jazz” into one end of the machine, turned the handle, and out the other end came…
Glenn Miller.
Attempts at cloning the music of Louis Armstrong and New Orleans.
Saccharine Broadway ballad singers.
So-called “territory bands” and literally thousands of stocks…stock arrangements that could be bought and played by almost any fairly well developed group of amateurs for the amazement and edification of the country club sets in Oshkosh, Waukegan and points west.
All had become the order of the day.
Sure, there were geniuses at work…Duke Ellington, the group that coalesced around Count Basie, the musicians white and black who flocked to New York City to work in the clubs, theaters and recording scene of the day, the thriving black urban scenes of smaller towns like Kansas City and Chicago…but the music that filtered out to the public?
Lame, by and large.
However, in a little club in Harlem…Minton’s, a dank little drug-ridden cellar by all the eyewitness accounts that I have heard…and in a few other places in New York City as well, a group of wildly gifted young men were busily at work completely re-inventing the idiom.
Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and their original acolytes.
Now this little pocket history of the development of bebop…a revolution so profound that 65 years later literally hundreds of thousands of musicians all over the world are STILL simply probing the harmonic and rhythmic depths that those men first explored, depths that are now as commonly accepted as were the “jazz” sounds of the ’20s and ’30s, to be heard in elevators and Gap stores and upscale coffee shops and film/TV/ad underscores…this little history would serve no real purpose here except to perhaps inform a few of us about a segment of our cultural history of which most Americans are almost totally ignorant.
Except…THE MUSIC ESCAPED THE CONFINES OF MINTON’S.
And how did it do so?
Besides on its own merits?
It did so through the efforts of shoestring independent producers over a period of 20 years or more. Of jazz fans (Fan. From the word “fanatic”) who opened little record stores all over America on a dollar three-eighty and a prayer. Of small-time DJs who pumped the music out into the night on low-power radio stations like WADO radio in NYC. (With me and my transistor radio/single earplug out on Long Island hidden under the covers at 3AM on weekday nights listening to Bird and Diz and Miles and Getz in 1958, wondering how the FUCK these people could play what they were playing. Listening in wonder rather than getting some sleep to prepare for jive-ass school the next day. Me and thousands of others all over the country.) Of equally crazy club owners who opened little cellar jazz clubs where the cognoscenti went to bathe in the glow of underpaid, scuffling, generally fucked-up musical geniuses for the price of a beer.
But it happened!!!
And it nudged the entire culture forward a couple of notches in the process.
Now?
In a Minton’s somewhere in America?
If there WERE a group of players capable of making equivalent strides?
They would never be heard.
They would be washed away in the Noah’s flood of bullshit that crams the minds of Americans with sheer garbage on a level and in a quantity that has never even been APPROACHED before in the entire history of humankind.
Bet on it.
As above, so below?
As below, so above as well.
This microcosm of societal development…this snapshot of evolution on the human level…holds true up and down the system.
Today?
Madame Curie?
Bought and sold by Dr. Big Brother Pharma before she could ever put bunsen burner to test tube.
James Joyce?
His first book made into a movie starring Tom Cruise. Marries a pop star and descends into cocaine-induced mediocrity.
Abe Lincoln?
Doesn’t show up well on TV. And those long, elaborate phrases!!!
“NEXT!!!”
Replaced by Barack Obama.
Honest Abe ends up the mayor of Springfield, Illinois and dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while watching a Ford commercial. Something about his wife’s Prozac habit.
And on and on and on and on it goes.
Where it stops?
Nobody knows.
In fact, damned few people even care.
Too busy trying to keep up with their credit card and mortgage debt, their automobile payments, their health insurances, their retirement funds, their kids’ college costs.
Or…too busy simply trying to stay alive and fed.
Or…”What’s on tonight, Honey? American Idol? GREAT!!! I wonder which mediocre asshole will win THIS time!!!”
So…long story short, Lisa?
Yes, disinfo has always been with us. It’s what’s for dinner. What has ALWAYS been for dinner.
And yes, there is a Santa Claus as well.
A ghost in the machine, a crack in the societal wall.
He just can’t come here anymore.
Too expensive, and he’s liable to get shot down.
So it goes.
And so it will end, as well.
Calcified into non-movement and then taken down by quicker, more lithe predators.
So it goes…unless this single remaining crack in the wall, this widespread Minton’s of the mind that we call the left blogosphere proves to be sufficient to change the course of the society far enough so that there occurs a small rebirth of individual opportunity in this country. The recent Dem landslide…a continuing and even accelerating landslide as even a cursory glance at the current news-cant will show you…was a direct result (A centrist, compromised result I grant you, but that’s how it works.) of efforts by people like you to put the truth of the matter out there and make it available to anyone with a computer, a mouse and a little curiosity.
The internet…the WADO radio of the present.
Thousands of Symphony Sids (An early bebop disc jockey) pound pound pound pound pound pound pounding out their anti-clomp-clomp-clomp message on EVERY level.
MILLIONS reading their efforts.
Your own wonderful articles on the real story of the Intel establishment in America.
My efforts, Booman’s efforts, Maryscott O’Connor’s efforts…yes, even the efforts of the dreaded Kosmonaughts…
The efforts of the literally MILLIONS of people who post all over the internet about…
About the best digital camera, the hippest tenor player, the best way to clean spilled grape juice off of a t-shirt…about EVERYTHNG.
The results of those efforts are the only remaining cracks in the monolithic Great Wall that has been built by the Corps to protect their empire.
And baby…if we ain’t Genghis Khan and the Mongols to this Great Wall…then history really IS over.
Bet on it.
We shall see.
Keep bitting.
Keep byting.
We shall soon see.
Peace.
Peace spread by the dissemination of open information.
The truth shall set you free.
Or so I pray.
That IS my story. And I AM sticking to it.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
