On Propaganda and Boredom
August 22, 2020
ALAN writes:
There will be no reunion for my 1964 classmates this year because of propaganda about the alleged virus. It would have been our 56th-year reunion. How many of us will be there for the 57th? We had planned to hold a between-times get-together last April, but the virus propaganda blew that idea out the window.
All of you older readers of The Thinking Housewife: Can’t you just imagine American men in 1942 saying:
Well, folks, we will have to postpone defending our country until Daddy Government gives us permission to go outside without safety masks to protect us against an enemy even worse than the Japs and the Nazis. We must stop working at our jobs. We must stop going to church. We must stay at home and stare at the radio until Daddy Government tells us otherwise.
Could they have been that gullible in 1942? That stupid?
Then try to imagine what they would say about a population who respond to such instructions from Daddy Government like a flock of obedient little lambs.
Of course it is just a coincidence (Isn’t it?) that massive propaganda about an alleged virus is used as an excuse for Americans to surrender so much power over their lives–exactly a hundred years after the founding of the ACLU (American Communist Liars Union), one of whose ultimate goals was to make America into a Communist nation. (How do we know this? We know it because Roger Baldwin, one of its founders, said so. And a Communist wouldn’t tell a fib, would he?)
What better way to commemorate that historic occasion than with a propaganda barrage, Communist-engineered riots and lawlessness, a revolutionary “lockdown” of ordinary, decent, working-class Americans, and a corollary increase in power for the government, the mass communications industry, and the medical and pharmaceutical rackets? It stands to reason that anyone who engineered such a multi-pronged attack would encounter little if any opposition from a population of American men who have been thoroughly feminized.
Never have so many American men agreed so cheerfully to surrender the rights of individuals and the limitations on government power that earlier generations fought wars to create and defend. I learned long ago that false premises are the basis for mythmaking, and modern myths are indeed fodder for thousands of chattering magpies in the mass propaganda industry.
Knowingly or otherwise (mostly otherwise), Americans have now made giant strides toward what Dr. Thomas Szasz called “The Therapeutic State and what Communists have been planning for a hundred years.
I am sick and tired of the do-gooder mush in “We are all in this together” and “Thank you for looking out for each other.” Here’s a news flash for the do-gooders: I am not “looking out for each other”. Not my job. And “each other” are not looking out for me. Not their job.
Recently I had a brief message from classmate Jim. I asked him about classmate Tony, who has had back problems and knee problems. I was glad to receive Jim’s reply: “Tony is doing fine. Just bored like the rest of us.”
Hold on there for a moment. “Bored….”? Allow me to voice my dissent. I am not bored. Angry? Yes. Outraged? Yes. Skeptical? Yes. Confident that we are being lied to repeatedly and on multiple fronts? Absolutely.
Confident that what we have witnessed is not a “lockdown” but a Takedown? Yes. Confident that it is not about health but about power and power-lust? Absolutely. Confident that there are diabolical cultural, political, and philosophical purposes behind the propaganda about the alleged virus? Absolutely. Confident that the Takedown is either a dress rehearsal for the coming Communist World Government (which is now, as the cliché goes, “under construction”) or an exercise to measure the Servility Quotient of Americans (rather high, by all appearances), or both? Absolutely. But “bored”? Never.
We are alive, aren’t we? Since when is it boring to be alive? You can think, see, hear, talk, and remember, can’t you? Or is staring at screens all you care to do nowadays?
Wake up, classmates. Stop scaring at screens and listening to lies. My years are numbered, and maybe yours are, too.
How can anyone be bored with the perspective on life that three score-and-ten years have now my classmates and me? And what of all those memories we have accumulated? If the virus propaganda has given you “time on your hands”, then why not use it to write about what you know best? Our memories ARE history. Don’t take it all with you when you leave. Write it now, or some portion of it, for your descendants or friends or classmates.
Imagine how gratified we would be if our grandparents or great-grandparents had left written memories of their lives in the form of diaries, journals, essays, letters, and cards. Conversations are fine. But they are like meteors: Once they take place, they are gone. Written memories will remain. The printed word remains. Why not share some of them by writing about them? About your life in those years in our parish and neighborhood? About the people and moments you remember best, and why?
Six years ago, I wrote ten two-columned pages of memories we have in common from our school years. Last year I wrote 57 pages of memories of the songs and records we enjoyed in the years 1956-’68. I have written more than fifty additional pages of memories from those years and had intended to share them with classmates at the upcoming reunion…..now rendered null and void by the Communist/Socialist/Globalist Propaganda Barrage…..oops, I mean the deadly virus.
There is no “Dutchtown Historical Society”. We are it. Life as it was in that neighborhood during our school years is what we carry around in our heads. Who will ever know about life as it was there? Who will ever know that Dutchtown was not what it is now but the opposite: A clean, decent, civilized place to live and grow up, if we do not write about it?
“We will take our memories of America’s traditional culture with us to the grave and that will be the end of it,” reader Jane S. wrote to Lawrence Auster ten years ago. [“A Lament for Our Vanishing Culture”, View from the Right, August 20, 2010 ]
She was right. That is, unless those who —like her— remember that traditional American culture write what they remember. Like her, we are the last generation to remember that pre-1960s American culture, and among the last to be able to think and write about it without paying homage to the vocabulary and ideology by which younger generations are now taught to view it through pink- and red-tinted glasses.
Yesterday I was standing at one of the two lakes in Carondelet Park when I saw a young couple with their infant child across the lake. No masks. They were sitting on the grass at water’s edge and encouraging their child’s fascination with a group of ducks and geese who approached them. They were out in the open air in a lush green setting late on a pleasant summer day and encouraging their child’s discovery of the delight and wonder that may be found in making friends with birds.
To observe scenes like that is a good reason to be alive. To create scenes like that is a good way to spend “time on your hands”. To listen to the lies, fallacies, and misrepresentations raining down upon us is a complete waste of your time and your life.
Six years ago, a reader wrote in response to some of my essays:
“I can vouch for Alan’s eloquent description of what it was like. [ i.e., Life in south St. Louis in the 1950s-’60s ] It is vital that his testimony and the testimony of his peers appear on the Net. They are historical documents.” [“When Baseball was Baseball”, The Thinking Housewife, July 30, 2014]
Why don’t you add to those historical documents by writing some of your own memories of life in St. Louis as it was before the revolutionary 1960s?
— Comments —
Rudiger writes:
“Could they have been that gullible in 1942? That stupid?” “I am sick and tired of the do-gooder mush in ‘We are all in this together’ and ‘Thank you for looking out for each other.’”
I think Alan has understated the gullibility of the masses down through the centuries in this country. How do you think Abe Lincoln got tens of thousands of Mainers and their fellow northern states to invade southern sister states for merely wanting to peacefully leave the Union? How do you think Woodrow Wilson got boys to delightfully sign up to go “over there” or in 1942 to do it again? What about rationing? Women in the factories? The Feds have pushed, “we are all in this together” before. And the citizens have always gone for it.
Rudiger adds:
There are a lot of people in the comments sections of dissident blogs who think WWI was a test to see how compliant the U.S. white male population was. And the New Deal was implemented based on an affirmative, “Yes, they are compliant and easily manipulated.”
Also, the “civil war.” Explain to me why any farm boy in Vermont could care about negro freedom. Give me a break. They were sold something else. And it was done for this religious “Union.” The masks feel the same. All those endless wars were, “We’re all in this together.”
Laura writes:
World War II made the world safe for Communism. We lost the war, but that doesn’t mean the soldiers weren’t patriots or heroes.
Laura adds:
I could understand a Vermont farm boy caring about slavery. I mean, at least I hope he would. Too bad he was told there had to be a war to end it.
