Some Political Hot Tamales and Red Pepper Flakes to Get You Thru the Mid-Week Blahs
By
David Gottfried
In perusing my computer, I noticed that I created a bunch of videos excoriating the political assholes who have captured my imagination.
These four poems aspire to constitute a sonic Molotov cocktail
Since some of you might find my polemical “storm und drung” (footnote 1) a bit too belligerent, I am also giving you two additional videos each of which contains one funny poem.
Hey, Baby, Let’s Bang Some Fucking Gongs
Honor the Empire: Smoke Marlboro Cigarettes
I am offering you a few of my furious poems because no one will listen to reasoned argument because pictures always crowd out language and ideas in any debate. And today America is mesmerized by pictures showing the ruins of Ukrainian towns and dead people.
I won’t say that the pictures of destroyed apartment buildings and dead people are hoaxes -- such a contention would made me appear to be a Putin stooge. However, I must call attention to some of the truly brilliant pictorial hoaxes that the pentagon has foisted on the American people in the past. Don’t assume anything.
During the Vietnam War, we routinely saw film footage of what news announcers told us were our allies, the South Vietnamese, fighting the communists. This buttressed the bogus belief that a sizable number of Vietnamese wanted to fight the communists. The news announcers did not reveal the origin of the film footage. The film footage came from the pentagon.
The film footage was shot in Georgia. Very simply, the Pentagon brought South Vietnamese soldiers to America to run around and play soldier and look nice and tough for the camera. And the American people were told that this footage consisted of Vietnamese soldiers fighting the communists. So please don’t tell me that we have a wonderful democracy when our news programs are shot through with lies. Don’t tell me that we have a liberal media when the allegedly liberal media doesn’t tell us that the film footage they show comes from the Pentagon.
I also doubt news stories because journalists are often dopes. This next example, about medical journalism, shows that even the guys at the New York Times write truly stupid stories.
About 15 years, the New York Times reported that certain cancers were about to be cured because we had discovered drugs which prevented tumors from building a circulatory system which fed the tumor with the patient’s blood. Unfortunately, the drugs did not work. (If I recall correctly, one of the families of drugs were called angiostatins) About five years later – in other words, about 10 years ago – the New York Times once again had a story which said that certain cancers were about to be cured because we had discovered a class of drugs which prevent tumors from constructing their own circulatory system. Finally, the Time apologized profusely and had to admit that the grey lady was getting senile. Isn’t this freaking amazing ??!! The Times published a story saying that angiostatins were about to cure cancer having forgotten that five years before the Times had said the exact same thing but the drugs just didn’t work.
In any event, with politicians like Lyndon Johnson, and news people like the blow-dried bimbos on Fox News whose only journalistic credential is bomb shell blondeness, everything one hears must be taken with about 2700 hundred grains of salt.
Whatever I say won’t matter much because the electronic media has made the world a global village of shrieking children whose political perspectives are almost entirely contingent on what sort of pictures they happen to see. For example, the New York Times reported that Ukrainians have shot Russian soldiers after they had surrendered. Shooting POWs is considered a reprehensible war crime, and Germans, who shot American POWs at Malmedy, were executed. But the Ukrainian shooting of Russian POWs is getting only scant reporting because there are no pictures to go with the story.
For example, a lot of the very bad coverage Israel used to get in the 70s and 80s, relative to the coverage the Arabs got, was the consequence of press freedoms which prevailed in Israel and were non-existent in surrounding Arab countries.
For example, in 1983, the Syrian government killed every single resident of one of its own cities, the city of Hana. About 5,000 to 10,000 people were killed in one quick, decisive bloodbath. The Syrian government did not let newsmen run around and take pictures. Therefore, this news story got very little coverage. You could read about this story on page 28 of the New York Times, but 98 percent of the American people never see page 28 of the New York Times. Outside of the better newspapers, none of the media mentioned this slaughter because their viewers only want news with pictures. CBC evening news, and all the other moronic news shows as well, did not mention the slaughter because they only talk about happenings that have pictures to pull at the voyeuristic and puerile emotions of their stupid viewers. By contrast, whenever Israeli law enforcement used rubber bullets to quell a disturbance, every media outlet from Athens to Alaska screamed about the sins of Zionism.
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Footnote 1:
Translated from the German this means, roughly, “storm and stress” and was a late Baroque, Central European artistic movement which ushered in the Romantic era.