Marketing Fear

Leave it to Gary Trudeau. Often cloyingly old-line liberal, but just as often the dude's as elemental and profound as a Johnny Cash lyric. Check out the full strip's original, October 16 panel once you click the link.

A heads-up--I'm about to get nuts here, but ride along with me, for I'll bring it home...
The fascists, big oil, big pharma, the Christian fundamentalists--they all have bet the farm on this upcoming mid-term election. Our retarded puppet of a President's legacy is riding on it. Do you really think they'll stick to any so-called rules of engagement when power and its attendent arrogance, entitlement--which is the lodestar of this whole mess, not patriotism or even greed--could be ceded? Watch the headlines over the next two weeks, watch the gas prices, watch the Deibold voting machines and beware. I am a Republican and I lament the passing of the Weikers, the Bakers, the Rockefellers, the African American statesmen like Senator Ed Brooke and Bill Coleman, Sr. Even Dubya's grandfather, Prescott Bush, US Senator from Connecticut, was a an enlightened, thoughtful man with progressive, even liberal, views. What happened?

Well, regardless of the outcome, I willmake a good faith attempt at ducking when the conspiracy theories fly. Sometimes Ill have to look up and see what's plausible and what's plain crazy, however. And I do have my own. Yes, fear as a pr/marketing tool is one. Trial lawyers aren't the bane of democracy; advertising and "message"-smiths are. Now you have a millieu where regular people are working harder, communting longer for your little piece of a shinking pie and looking forward to your six days of accrued vacation as you listen to Rush Limbaugh deride Europeans as fags for having six weeks. Your head is down at work while you're watched in your cubicle. Your head his down as you baste in traffic fumes--at 4a.m. because that's what time you have to be on the road to get to work by 8:30a.m. Your head his down in front of the TV because that's the only entertainment or enlightenment you can muster because you are drained. Your head is down as you watch your family pass by with their heads down, them in their on worlds, text-messaging and exchanging ignorant notions of the other people, other neighborhoods, other nations because hey, everyone's head isdown. Better yet, the few people who do raise their heads are slapped down as crackpots, troublemakers, traitors, "non-team players," whatever. And while your head is down, power's being consolidated to make sure it (1) it stays down and (2) you're brainwashed into loving it.

You're even brainwashed into thinking that a southern border of wet toilet paper is a boon to the economy. Hey, the blacks aren't going to wash cars and hang drywall, right? Oh and my favorite as we shade in sci fi/horror for Halloween...when the "end" does come. When Soylent Green's served in Blade Runner type street bars. When everyone's fat and sick and dependent on Pfizer for life itself, "they" will have amassed the resources to afford everything that you're children and grandchildren will have to scratch for as if in a Brazilian slum. They will have the gated...hell, maybe domed communities where the food's plentiful and they have their own air and water. Yep, their own pristine air and water. But hey, it was worth getting rid of "the death tax."

Don't be afraid. Stick your head up. Encourage others to do the same. Read books. Walk. Breathe. Challenge. Create. That will start a revolution, and we won't be prisoners of fear...or marketing.