THE PROPAGANDA OF AMERIKA,THE BEST AT EVERYTHING
As you can tell, I'm in a "political mood" these past few days, with a few exceptions. For myself, my disbelief in the American propaganda about itself began decades ago with my disillusionment with the American academy, and indeed, American education in general. By the time I reached the graduate level, it was clear to me that - well, to put it bluntly - I was oftentimes more informed than my professors about the subject area of my study (theology and philosophy), than they were. And despite my attempts to be heard, or to have my own personal interests and research goals acknowledged, the system wasn't designed to do either, and hence, my journey overseas to do a Ph.D. Since that time, the disillusionment has spread to other areas: politics, the economy, government, you name it.
Well, I ran across this editorial piece, and it resonated with me:
A Fatal Self-Absorption The Tea Party and American Exceptionalism
Those opening lines say it all: "Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them. We face rule by pajama party. Saints preserve us, someone with the foregoing understanding may become the president of the (for a few moments more) most powerful, erratic, and ignorant country on the planet. Among presidential possibilities we now have Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin and, in the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avenue, Precedent Obama—political epiphytes all, fantasists, tent-revival Christians, provincial governors, inward-looking certitudinous naifs."
We have begun to believe our own propaganda about ourselves: that we are the best, brightest, best-educated, most-well-read, informed, when the opposite is true. Our schools and universities are, by and large, fatuous failures."The boobs cannot compare themselves with people of other nations, since they know nothing of remote places and are not interested." All too true, and I, like many Americans, find myself turning more and more to foreign news sources and away from the shrill, endlessly-fighting, faked "town hall" debates and idiocy of the American media.
Our lack of basic cultural literacy, knowledge of European let alone world history, the fact that our "education" system cannot even awaken, and indeed deadens, curiosity, allows our leaders to stumble from one adventure to another. We believe that we are the best and brightest simply because we "are," simply because we are "American", and have to do nothing else other than "be" American. Such blithering boobery and nitwittery led another nation to follow a shouting demagogue down a similar path of blind arrogance and "nation building."
OK...I'm done. Thanks for letting me vent!
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I agree the schools stink both private as well as public schools I have been in both but the public schools especially in NYC where I was born had excellent school libaries when I was in school at the time so what ever real education I got was in them and the city public library system my favorite subjects are history and science and paperback books were cheap to buy then. Things are different now it is only soft covers and hard backs and electronic readers which I don’t have if you really had to learn these subjects you really have to do it your self. If you one to know how ignorant proffessors history are the was a program on WNET channel 13 about what if history and I a student in school at the time about the early 1960s could do a better job spectulating about about what if than the three proffessors of histroy on the show I still can. I will give you another example the world maps are wrong in the USA they should be centered on the Pacific ocean to give people a better relationship of the land mass to each other example there hasn’t been a western hemisphere since the Americas attach themselves to Afro-Eurasia forming the super continent Afro-Eurasia-North-Middle-South America -Antarctica-Greenland if they can’t get the world maps striat their hopeless.
Digitize all Americans, and then press erase.
OK…that one I find totally uncalled for…
“They are continually talking about YOUR patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty NEVER takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.
PSYCHIC BURRITO, BLITHERING BOOBERY, nitwittery.
Keep up a MOXIEl! I love it! Shows us you got good old fashion SPINE!
Look at some of these old school red brick buildings. They look like just what they are – penal-institutions. Only two things one learns in them: That the teacher is the BOSS and don’t be late or Tardy. We cant have a factory running properly if everybody comes in whenever they felt like it.
Propagandists always use good words or ideas or always have the best of intentions but buyer beware. Their hands are UNCLEAN.
Here’s any example Orwell Relatives:
In my local community a committee was granted a hundred-so thousand dollars to help high school DROP-OUTS. Now if this newspaper were reporting the real state of affairs in a kind and just Society then the head-lines would have read:
Local Committee receives a hundred thousand dollars to help BURNT-OUT former High-School teachers who DROPPED OUT of the Field. That would be more kind and just but who believes we are living in a kind and just Society?
Think of this if you still have doubts — Who gets burnt out? People who over-work, people who care too much, people who still feel they have a ethical and moral obligation to treat students to the same advantages they themselves had. Etc and ETc.
Now think of someone having a real easy time of it. Coasting through collecting on the gravy-train a nice paycheck for being the BOSS in a classroom full of idiots. They barely passed their college courses but they got A’s in brown-nosing or knowing which way the wind is blowing which kind of reminds me — it’s not what you know but who you … Sound kind of familiar?
Good Article for it also hints at a solution to all this. If only more parents had the resources to Home-School or if some wise-tutor was available.
Magister Ludi where are you?
I should have typed in my post the words:
HERE’S MY EXAMPLE OF SOME OF ORWELL’s RELATIVES:
I am getting sloppy.
Oh yes. one more thought about the Occupying protests?
I remember Baudrillard predicting all kinds of funny happenings with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He compared the Eastern Block as a gigantic block of Ice that is beginning to melt and the jetsam will float to the top.
I am not so sure that is something to look forward to? I was in the military during the Civil Rights days and I got so sick and tired of CERTAIN PEOPLE repeating the SOUTH will rise again. Their entitled to their beliefs but when you hear it spoken over and over again it’s a bit like placing your head in a huge liberty bell and then having someone ring or GONG it!
Well, I had enough of non-sense. My RETORT WAS ( and I was lucky I didn’t get beat up but then now that I think of it I must have been tough but you could have fooled me because in the Marines I didn’t feel tough at all. I felt just like a piece of property or a thing with a serial no. but all that is besides the point. )
My RETORT WAS:
The SOUTH will rise again because SHITE floats.
Protestors —- Round and round we go!
I joined the Marines because I didn’t have a good enough teacher who would have recognized I was looking for a RITE OF PASSAGE into MANHOOD. Boy, did I find it, ha, ha!
Wilson Woodrow, that sycophant, sold the balls of your country when he gave the banksters the Federal Reserve. Apart from the racism (we’re the best mentality is racism you know), lack of education and ethnocentricity, there’s nothing wrong with Americans in general. We all have faults. I hope that the government of the USA will take back control of the Federal Reserve.
Woodrow Wilson, I mean lol!
Dear Joseph,
Your fulminations against American dys-education and ludicrous ruling class dogmas are so justified—not to mention your own magnificent research—that i regret to ask you why you accept, unquestioningly, the American ruling class’ victor’s history about demon Nazis and the Holocaust (even though you refuted the “allied legend” about the Nazi atom bomb); and why you refer to Jewish central bankers as “Anglo-Americans”? Perhaps you are simply being prudent. After all, anyone who did the research you did for “LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy” surely read Michael Collins Piper”s “Final Judgment,” and therefoe knows about Jews’ and Israel’s interest in killing Kennedy for opposing the Israeli nuclear weapons program and for printing Greenbacks instead of borrowing from the Fed—yet these two Jewish motives are nowhere mentioned in “LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy.” Didn’t you leave them out for prudence’s sake? Nobody criticizes Jews for assassinating JFK, right?
Similarly, it’s hard to believe a great Alternative Researcher has never read any of Victor Suvorov’s dozen books on Stalin’s preparations to invade Europe in July 1944—prevented only by Hitler’s pre-emptive strike in June. A good place to start is Suvorov’s “The Chief Culprit,” from Amazon. Please don’t leave out Christian Rakovsky’s “Red Symphony,” online at: http://www.illuminati-news.com/052106a.htm, among other places.
With respect to the Holocaust, have you ever run into mention of even a single autopsy indicating death by poison gas of anyone in German-occupied Europe? Why not read Faurisson or Juergen Graf online? i suspect you may already have. But if not, Graf’s best, short book is “Holcaust or Hoax,” online at: http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/hoh/index.html.
Do you really not know that the ethnicity of Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank; of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, late head of the IMF; of Goldman Sachs, employers of Robert Zoelleck, head of the World Bank (following Paul Wolfowitz); of Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England; and of Ben Bernanke, head of the Fed—is Jewish? If you do, don’t you persist in calling them “Anglo-American” just out of prudence—not to be stigmatized as anti-Semitic?.
With admiration and best wishes,
john
Coming from another angle, those with an open mind toward astrology and psychology will find Jessica Murray’s book, “Soul-Sick Nation” an articulate analysis of the group soul of the USA, based on it’s natal horoscope.
It explains why, as a Cancerian (July 4th) nation we continue to believe we are the most generous people in the world (all that foreign aid! And look what we are doing to bring freedom and democracy to other nations!), all the while being blind to our own dark shadow side that doesn’t see the atrocities performed in this emperial quest (“The all-loving, but all-controlling parent: I know what is good for you!).
This is just an example. Murray is articulate and insightful. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the American psyche, and why we ARE so basically isolationist and un-reflective.
If nothing else, click on the link and read the description and the reviews. It will expand Joseph’s conversation, above.
http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Sick-Nation-Astrologers-View-America/dp/1425971253
Right on! I have observed from having many friends from many nations and cultures, is that by talking to them it has become glaringly apparent to me that the USA seems to be the ONLY culture in the world (well, let’s call it the Anglosphere) that still believes the mainstream media, and does not just assume it is propaganda, thereby developing more sensitive ways of discerning truth. And we (in the US) still seem to think that, for the most part, our elected representatives are who they say they are and while there may be SOME corruption going on, it is isolated and we usually root it out. “The system works,” is the overall meme. After all, don’t we have the best “free press” in the whole wide world? 🙂
It seems to me that people in other countries are not fooled and thereby ASSUME corruption and that they are being lied to and therefore develop their own tools of discernment, their own ways of networking what is REALLY going on under the official story, etc. I believe this narcissistic tendency is one of the main reasons the rest of the world just cannot understand the US. While we tend to look in our collective mirror and see the brave, illustrious Eagle, I’m sure they must think we all go around like the proverbial ostrich, with our head in the sand and our you-know-whatsky exposed, further thinking that what emanates from that orifice doesn’t stink!
I do think the internet HAS been a revolutionary force because it has freed information in ways that I’m sure the controllers never intended and can’t quite figure out how to get back in the box. More and more people are turning off their TV sets and getting their information from the internet, often on websites such as this, where they get a look under the rug, so to speak. Once they take the “red pill,” there is no going back….AND that movement is infectious.
So I DO have faith in the overall thrust of freedom within humanity. I also fear the blowback as those in control feel the loss of control and use every tool at their disposal, which is enough for massive depopulation if not an extinction level event, to achieve their goals.
These are exciting times, but they are also very dangerous times. I am putting my energy into the future that I want to live and doing my best to become aware of, but not engaged in polarized embattlement with, that which I do not want to see continue. THIS is the power of human creativity at its best, IMHO.
Dr. Farrell,
I know you may not be a metal fan, but I am sure you will see the funny side of this-Germans taking the piss out of Amerika:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y4vIzEkd6s
When I started the first grade in 1963, in Texas, there were two students who had “failed” the first grade and were repeating it.
I had, at that time, and for several years afterward, the idea that as time went on the vast majority of people would seek knowledge and understanding and that by the time I was a grown-up, pretty much everybody would be well educated, well intentioned, and have a basic understanding of what things were all about.
The last time I ever answered an essay question on a test was in the 8th grade. That was 1971. Thereafter, academic testing questions became fill-in-the-blank and then nothing but multiple choice, usually with only four, or less, answers to choose from.
By the time I graduated high school in 1975, not only were classes categorized as “advanced,” which I considered “normal” classes as compared to earlier years, and “regular” which taught…nothing, but there was another high school that people could go to across town that taught stuff like wood working (instead of chemistry lab).
Please be cognizant that I went to three different high schools in three different states before graduating so I have a pretty good idea that this trend was nationwide.
I remember in my 12th grade English class, there were people who could hardly read, couldn’t read out loud AT ALL, and they passed that course, though NOT with an ‘A.’
No one “failed” anymore nor were they held back a year for anything. When I graduated, I received a diploma in the usual ceremony. However, some people did not graduate. These people were all given a “Certificate of Attendance” for having attended school for twelve years and, thought they were not part of the graduation ceremony, they were considered “educated” nevertheless.
That was over thirty years ago.
Joseph,
I got my BA in philosophy and English at the University of Chicago, often dubbed “the teacher of teachers” because of the disproportionate percentage who continue on to graduate degrees. I assumed I would do this as a lifelong lover of wisdom, but I couldnt do it.
I didn’t know how to articulate this at the time (a decade ago), but I intuited a adulterant to the learning process that only increased as one moved upward into supposed scholarship.
Now, fate and the internet, combined with a gnostic quest always questioning my assumptions, has taught me how blessed I am to have taken every wrong turn in the school we might call Earth.
This was hit home as I recently encountered my high school history teacher on Facebook. Now both adults, I thought I could ask this man for his real insights into history and the supression of it.
He had no idea what I was talking about. And I have noticed a similar pattern among others who are steeped in academic culture. Are they nit the most close minded? Are they not aware of how much their foundational knowledge depends on trusted governments, sacred cows and worst of all, consensus?
Michael Crichton always impressed me by going against the grain with climate change, making the point that science is not about consensus. You remind me of Michael Crichton.
I would love to know more details about what repulsed you from studying in America and if you advocate a similar course for others of your independent nature. What is the international scholarship scene and how does it figure into the modern geopolitical scene?
I tend to view academia as an extension of the security state or establishment, and a total rip off for young students today. I have spent the last decade unlearning so much. Do you know what I mean?
James L.
James,
I agree, academia is a product of the state-concensus culture. The old university traditions that I so cherished about the Old Fiend are dying, so I am told, as that venerable institution, too, is being corporatized and transformed according to the American-globalist corporate model. Frankly, I do not view any place any more as a safe haven of free inquiry. We are perhaps returning, I think, to an ancient or classical paradigm, where one studies closely and intimately with a personal master or mentor, and to the traditions of the academy in the ancient sense, perhaps even a kind of hermeticism. With a the exception of a few islands of sanity in this insane system, I don’t see much of a future for American education if things continue as they have gone the past few decades.
Best,
Joseph F
“Thanks for letting me vent!”
anytime, Dr. Farrell- please “vent” even more often-
all I can say is: as a former NE Ohioan living in Germany since 1978, I cannot tell you how disgustingly inferior my high school/university education was compared to my European colleagues-
I have “Batchular” of Music “Edumacation” and Master of (F)Arts degrees- big whoop-
OK, I’m only an opera-singer (anything but a scientist), but I can assure you or any reader of this website that Europeans (as well as Asian colleagues) have always had a far greater grasp of the basics of the world than I initially had- it took me awhile to catch up-
that all changed after 9/11- that was the day I decided to educate myself-
I can’t recommend home schooling enough-
by the way, I continue to devour Dr. Wood’s book- holy shit!- but she makes everything so easy for the layman to understand- what an intelligent, brave and beautiful entity she is-
God bless- Larry
Excellent book that is! It occupies the place on my bookshelf right between ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and “The Giza Death Star.”
Rand huh? http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory74.html
That’s a total load of crap you linked to, Spirit Spice. It is FULL of lies and misrepresentations which are the hallmark and calling card of every person who bashes Rand.
It is obvious that you couldn’t care less about getting your facts straight; but if you did, a very good place to start would be here:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/
BTW: What’s on YOUR bookshelf?
Me thinks you are bit too attached to your goddess. You are normally more objective than this. If even half is accurate, Rand is garbage. Objectivism certainly is.
I live in Australia, however I did live for three years in the USA back in the mid 70′.
There are some people even here that see the US going to the dogs, comments on Obama here are also “who is he kiddin” and oh no, not another terrorist threat.
I dont think that its fixable, its gone too far to be pulled back, there’s too much money involved.
A revolution is coming I believe, however the military/police/three letter agencies have got the US public by the balls, so if it does come to that, its going to be ugly.
Oh and lets not forget the corporate controlled media, where’s Jim Marrs when you need him.
Google: John McMurtry News Hour Oct 15, 2011
This show addresses FRONT & CENTER what Dr. Farrell is pointing out.
It’s the Progressive News Hour with Stephen Lendman discussing ‘Amerika’/Global ‘propaganda’ and/at it’s DEEP CENTER’S CORE PURPOSE, with John McMuurtry.
OUTSTANDING!!!!!
Joesph, I wish you were wrong but you hit the problem dead on. I believe America was dynamic right after WWII;however, the JFK assassination and the Vietnam war sucked that vitality out of this country. Since then we have been on a delusional path led by corrupted politicians- what a combination. Now we are in a 14 trillion $ debt hole and it is getting larger by the minute. Hope Fulford is right about the demise of the Rockefeller/Fed/IMF gang. One more hope and that is the muderers of Christopher Story and others are brought to justice .
Well said.
Unfortunately, this evolution of the ‘American Education System’ has been continually politicized. Where the product is ‘purposed cheap labor’, a la the Rockefeller modus opperandi.
Ward Churchill has an excellent ‘education’ viewpoint that is expressed at: Daily Kos:WWL Radio #112 Ward Churchill Interview(Podcast) – Windows interview.
(As with many of these ‘interviews’, one has to suffer through the ignorance of the interviewer, who many times is THE expert on EVERYTHING! Unfortuneately, this is also a purposeful design mechanism related framing, & hence a ‘control’ factor. I’am sure Dr. Farrell has ‘suffered’ through one too many of these professed ‘expert’ interviews. AND one, is too many, literally.)
Great post Dr. Farrell! Could not have said it better. I felt the same way through college and law school! And that was in the old days…. late 60’s.
For staters, let’s stop calling them our leaders unless it happens that “we” need to be led, which leads to the next question…let where, followed by, who? If we aren’t able to grasp the distinction between individualism and the fictional nature of all collectives posing as real, then aren’t we condemned to keep pushing that boulder up the hill endlessly?
When we say we need leading, aren’t we in fact surrendering the liberty that allows us the free agency to act not only morally, but to contribute to the overall benefit of ourselves and others? Don’t we place ourselves instead as tools in the hands of someone else to be use to further their ends and not ours? Isn’t it by our own consent that we allow the state of things that are to exist in the first place? Why does the simple act of saying “no” in the face of these organized fictions resonate to the heart and soul of our very being? It may be that we need to start looking inward rather than outward to leaders for the solutions to our problems, or it could be that looking to leaders is itself the problem?
Couldn’t agree more, Joseph. Yeah, the more one is getting knowledge og the world’s historical, cultural, political diversity the more he/she gets open-minded, free of ideological patterns of any kind of that ideology. I fully can understand thinking American people who are done by the stagnating non-changungm unflexible paradygm, because – it must be emphasized – many people felt in the exactly same way in the former Soviet Union, being cut from other world by lyings of a Soviet propaganda, tiredness, the contrast of what happened really within the area that they could capture a sight with what they were hearing and wtaching through the fully controlled media. That’s true: there little of foreign lie penetrates through domestic lie, still so do the pieces of the truth. Therefore one should be careful, separating with scrupulous analysis objective information from abroad with that of banal propaganda.