Sunday, April 24, 2005

Propaganda Be Thy Name

MonikerRising
Ironyville


Stay with me for a minute while I attempt a reverse lay-up, behind-the-back trapezoidal lead of extreme obliquity from the piked position.

Hopefully it will pay off, but if you don't want to take a chance feel free to go straight to the bottom of the post. Just remember that the pre-amble is the part of these things that I actually work at.

****

Let's start by imagining that Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca was a actually a moral relativist who really longed to ask Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa the following question:

"Can anything born of a lie ever amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world?"

Now in matters of faith, the real thing, it might be possible to give an inch or so on that one and maybe, just maybe, come out unscathed

But when it comes to the use of the Big Lie to steamroller the common good into the pavement I honestly believe that, in the end, even the technique's most rabid proponents know in their heart of hearts that they are doomed.

Case in point - even Lee Atwater, one of the modern Godfathers of the practice, which has most recently been perfected by Karl Rove down south, repented when his number was called.

And while many have questioned Mr. Atwater's ultimate intentions, I think it is not unreasonable to conclude that even someone like him, someone whose political legacy was built on a pyramid of deception, exploitation and fear, truly did search his soul, at least for a nanosecond or two, in that period between the time he learned that he had a malignant brain tumor and the time that he died.

After all, the depths of despair have a way of doing that to a man, even when the hammer coming down has nothing to do with death.

Take Gordon Campbell for example. One can only imagine what our Premier might have offered up to his own private deity on that fateful night a couple of winters ago when he sobered up in a clean, well-lighted jail cell and came face-to-face with the realization that all he had worked for just might have instantly turned to crap.

Now, given the crocodile tears that accompanied his 'How could I have been so stupid?' pseudo-culpable mea at the time and his more recent slagging off on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, I wouldn't go far as to suggest that Mr. Campbell stepped through the looking glass and promised to repudiate all the damage that his neocon shock therapy had wrought on the hundreds of thousands of people desperately clinging to the lower rungs of British Columbia's socio-economic ladder.

No.

But, at the very least I figure that Mrs. Campbell's son might have promised himself that if he got out of that Oowie in Maui that he would come clean and start telling us the truth.

About his real intentions that is, which, as near as I can figure them, appear to involve seducing the really Big Trusts into saving us from ourselves while simultaneously making his brother's friends really, really rich.

And if this is indeed the case it is a philosphophy that has a lot in common with that old saw from Richard Nixon and Gordon Gecko that 'Greed is Good' for everyone.

Or, to take things just a wee bit further back, it is a credo that is reminiscent of Mark Twain's description of the underpinnings of the Gilded Age from the end of the last century - and I'm not talking about the 20th.

All of which might be wrong-headed, mean-spirited and historically dumb - at least to thinking, compassionate people.

But at least it's the truth.

And right up until a few weeks ago I really did think that Mr. Campbell had made the decision to go clear and that he was sticking to it.

After all, he did a fabulous job of getting rid of all those middle-of-the-roaders in his caucus while simultaneously pushing forward, unabated, with his privatization, deregulation, and tax burden shi(f)tification policies. And all this was happening out in the open, where anybody who was paying attention could see it for what it was. Even better, it was being not-so-subtly pitched as a necessary prelude to the birth of his 'Golden Decade'.

But now I'm all confused again (well, not really).

Because in a last-minute, warp-speed move back over to the expediency side of the ledger Campbell has gone on a wanton, province-wide spending blitzkrieg in which he is dispensing glistening globs so-called 'new' money for long-neglected trivial stuff like multicultural programs, diversity programs, public health programs, children's programs, family programs, seniors programs, longterm care programs, hospital programs, education programs and on and on and on and on.

Now I'm sure that there are plenty of solid internals to be found within those top-secret BigRedWarMachine-commissioned polls that have convinced Mr. Campbell's Atwater-inspired gunsels*, not to mention the old Socred rear-guard lurking just over his shoulder, that he must pull off this last minute excercise in slush fund-assisted tomfoolery so that he can hold onto those critical middle-of-the-road swing votes, particularly in ridings outside the Lower Mainland that have yet to be touched by the Trust that laid the Golden Egg.

But here's the weird part.......

What if Mr. Campbell were to be smacked down, hard, not because people suddenly wake up and smell the coffee, but rather because the latest round of propaganda blitzkriegs actually work so well that they don't and, as result, a significant portion of the electorate goes into a polling booth on May 17th actually believing that the B.C. Liberal party truly is, well, liberal.

Which just might amount to a really big hill of really crazy beans if you put any stock at all into the following little wisdom nugget buried deep within Paul Willcocks' most recent column:

"The official provincial Liberal position is that voters know that the federal and provincial parties - despite the same name - are chalk and cheese.

The public perception is different. The Strategic Counsel poll released this week found that 37 per cent of voters said the sordid reports from the Gomery inquiry are causing them to question the wisdom of voting for the Campbell Liberals on May 17. That is a large block of potentially disaffected voters, in a volatile campaign."


Or into this butchered line from an old Bruce Springsteen song:

"Is a dream a lie if it does come true......or is it something worse?"

Now I don't know whether the Boss would look kindly on the fact that I just changed his 'don't' to 'does'.

This much I do know for sure, however. When Springsteen released 'The River' a generation ago many working people in his native New Jersey were just starting to pay the price for Ronald Reagan's 'slash and burn', 'greed is way, way better than good' policies. Thus, he sure as hell wasn't singing about the muddy Fraser at the time.

But if he were to re-release the album tomorrow I'm not so certain that would still be case.

Because just last week somebody told him (Springsteen) that Mr. Campbell's minions were using another one of his songs, Glory Days, to try and tell a really big lie.

And the Boss called him on it.

Irony.

It's what we want.

___
*Need proof?: How about the fact that the hired guns have most recently managed to force the media herd, and that includes the local CBC, to run with the Rollie Keith non-issue for 4 straight newscyles.
Again for South of 49er's: Gordon Campbell is the sitting 'Liberal' Premier (ie. Govenor) of the Left Coast Canuckistanian province of British Columbia. Despite the name of his party he is actually a LINO (liberal in name only) who's very much into privatization, gutting social programs, busting unions, and generating craptacular corporatocries.

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