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
YOU know…
Later…
AG
Man, you sound almost optimistic that people might actually change something by writing on these here blogs. Inspirational.
After looking at dKos for a long time, though, I’m kind of thinking that we’re so far gone into some kinda mind controlled future where you can’t say anything that is outside the very narrow stream of mass-media created conventional thought without being shot down/shit on/ignored like a wild person in the desert/etc.
Still inspirational words, dude. I bet your music would be a trip.
I can empathize with that.
I am optimistic.
On the evidence.
On the evidence of the continued evolution of mankind over its entire history.
And by extension…on the evidence of the continued evolution of life itself on this planet.
A planet which is just a little backwater of the whole universe.
But if the Sufi concept of “As above, so below” holds true even on the highest of levels…a concept that has been sufficiently proven to me by the evidence of my own senses and observations on this plane upon which we all share our own existences… if it applies far above and far below us, then it is a universal law.
Literally the law of the universe.
Life evolves.
That which evolves is alive.
Universally. (As far as we can see, at the very least.)
Thus the universe is alive.
This living universe is evolving.
LIFE is alive.
The life of Life.
Praise be its unknowable names.
Now back to the mundane.
The here and now.
Blogs.
The internet and human society in general.
The United States in particular.
You write:
I KNOW that evolution continues.
I know that “evolution” is not a straight line.
There are failures.
There are regressions.
There are periods of little or no change.
There are periods of steady small change.
And there are quantum leaps.
In the United States, I see only ONE real, presently functioning agent of change at present.
The internet.
Not the government, not the political parties, not the churches, not the educational, scientific or so-called “intellectual” elites…they have ALL been bought and sold by short-term profit driven entities called corporations. And evolution is NOT about short-term profit. It is about long-term progression brought about through the taking of huge risks.
A large system cannot do this. It cannot AFFORD to this. Large systems are about the conservation of their own power. About stasis.
So…where IS this evolution occurring?
Look around.
It used to be in America that social evolution occurred mainly through the efforts of minorities.
New blood.
Remember the convection current experiment through which we all had to suffer in school? The one in which the heated water at the bottom of the flask rose and displaced the cooler water at the top, whereupon the same process repeated itself until the heat was turned off?
Again…as above, so below.
The poor at the bottom of the social convection system that was in place kept things moving.
The history of jazz in America is one of the clearest examples of that process.
Well, with the exception of the Spanish-speaking population of the U.S. that cannot be easily co-opted by the system as it stands because of language barriers that are not being effectively surmounted…and HOORAY for multiculturalism as far as I am concerned…that system is no longer functioning. The English speaking poor…which basically means the black population here…still burn, but their fire is either almost immediately co-opted by the Corps (Witness rap) or it is turned back upon them in the form of institutionalized poverty, drugs, crime and the so-called justice system.
So the question remains…where is this evolution happening?
The OTHER truly evolutionary forces that have occurred here within living memory were:
1-The Depression…where “the poor” were nearly EVERYBODY to one degree or another.
2-W.W. II…a fight for survival is always “evolutionary” if it is successful.
and
3-The youth movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Where the tactic of co-option was first perfected by the Corps.
Where now?
As a sort of mass movement?
Here.
On the internet.
An Information Revolution as befits an Information Age.
If you wanted to know about the CIA’s nefarious activities in 1973 or 1989 you had to haul yourself down to the best library you could find and spend DAYS tracking down scattered bits of information.
Today?
Google say <CIA +”Operation Mockingbird”>.
20,800 hits.
Have fun.
And go get educated.
Remember Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” meme?
Didn’t work…nice try, though. Got somewhere…just not quite far enough. Drugs will do that.
Today?
Sign on, tune in and drop UP.
Yes, I am optimistic.
Instead of being an (at least recently fashionable) minimalist, I am an optimalist.
I am optimalistic.
Because I believe in evolution.
On the evidence.
When will I STOP being an optimist?
An optimalist?
When I hear the Big Boom.
And not until.
And even then…my last thought will be something on the order of…”One small misstep for mankind. So it goes. The Universe continues unabated.”
“The-th-th-th-th-th-That’s all, folks!!!”
Yup.
And “So it goes” if I have the time for a second thought.
So it goes.
In the full confidence that there WILL be a “later”, I bid you farewell now.
And
Later…
AG
Here.
My Optimism? My OPTIMALISM. With Reasons. On The Evidence.
AG
You make a good case counselor. I read your stuff when I’m here, and enjoy it. I suppose I should have seen the optimism all the time. It is good to see. I’ve lost hope. But hope is always there, in posts, or guys you pass on the street who have human compassion, despite desperate circumstances, or whatever. In flowers plucked by your progeny and carried lightly.
I don’t know. I can go either way. Sometimes I’m dark.
My current obsession: The super-volcano under Yellowstone that seems to be almost certain to bury us at some point in the near future. The one that some scientists say nearly wiped out our species (we were down to a few thousand following the nuclear winter, according to their analysis of our mitochondrial DNA similarities) out. It erupts with clock-like precision. Only the second hand is moving on an evolutionary kind of clock, so you get a plus or minus 10s of thousands of years. But evolution could end tomorrow. Hope intelligence and creativity, like yours, finds a way to survive it all.
Like the universe.
There is no sense in being dark.
You do know that none of us are gettin’ outta here alive, right?
Well, once you accept the inevitability of your own death…and the first idea I personally allow myself to have when I wake up every morning is “Today is a good day to die”…once you accept that, brightness things tend to get much, much easier.
Bet on it.
I am not saying here that Life will not suddenly be through with us.
Do the Pontius Pilate routine and be done with it.
Or just not be there when the shit hits the fan.
Too busy.
I am not saying that the Yellowstone volcano or the Yellowhearts in the White House or a stray asteroid or any of an INFINITY of unforeseen and unforeseeable occurrences will not simply “Pffft” us off the face of the universe one fine Tuesday afternoon.
I am saying “So WHAT???”
Just go about your business. If a piano falls out of a window and hits you in head, pray for a good, square impact and be done with it.
Meanwhile…groove on.
Win, lose, or the usual somewhere-in-between.
Groove on.
What ELSE makes as much sense?
Later…
AG
Did you ever read the book Jurassic Park? Not the movie but the book… it’s kind of a hack story but there are some definitely relevant parts in there.
The dinosaurs bred and escaped not because of some “chink in the wall” but because “life finds a way”. It always does. There’s ALWAYS someone trying to build a wall around it and yet there’s ALWAYS a chink in the wall and life eventually ALWAYS does find a way.
I dont think there’s any difference between today and 500 years ago when the King of England made it a capital offense to translate the Bible (into English). It just seems different because there are more people on the planet – an order of magnitude more. And therefore the information control is on a much larger scale.
Every single authoritarian regime that’s been toppled (from within) started with a tiny group of organized people who found the crack in the wall. That was true under Jan Hus and the Lollards and it was true for Lazlo Tokes and its true today.
I think maybe youre just seeing the wall so clearly because you’re living in this here and now. It’s real all right 😉
Pax
Wanna see my bruises?
AG
I know it’s real. And the Lollards burned at the stake were real too. I just disagree with you that this is a NEW phenomenon – we both agree that it exists.
I’d further posit that a Pirsig model of metaphysics actually describes why this phenomenon exists and what the usefulness/value of it is.
Pax
Here.
My Optimism? My OPTIMALISM. With Reasons. On The Evidence.
AG