Iran, Again, and Again

Australian woman gets 18 years
for running over and killing man
who threw cheeseballs at her car.

What is this insanity over Iran? It seems the MSM and mostly everyone else has some weird obsession with Iran and some paranoid belief that Iran is somehow a threat to the U.S. The House today voted overwhelmingly to impose severe sanctions on Iran for their (perfectly legal) civilian nuclear program. The Pentagon assured us that our current anti-missile defense program (that only works sometimes) would protect us from Iranian missiles directed at the U.S. I can’t help it, I have to ask, what missiles? The Iranians don’t have any missiles that would reach the U.S. and have, in fact, said they don’t intend to have any (or course they can’t be trusted, they’re Iranians). But even assuming that they did have such missiles, by what bizarre stretch of the imagination would make anyone believe they would fire them at the U.S.? This is an idea so crazy it almost leaves me speechless. Of course it fits right in with the equally insane idea that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb to attack Israel and the U.S. This is, in Ed Schultz’s terms, “psycho talk,” pure and simple, and there is no evidence they are doing so. And we are treated daily with the phrase “nothing is off the table,” referring to the possibility that either we or Israel or both of us might attack Iran at any moment. Perhaps there is some reason for this strange campaign against Iran that I do not understand, maybe it has something to do with our current relationship with Israel, you know, that little country that keeps telling President Obama to go “piss up a rope,” apparently confident that upon their command he will do so (and so far they seem to be right). This fear of Iran, if it is genuine and not just hyped up for some reason I don’t understand, is absolutely devoid of any semblance of reality whatsoever. It is stupid, counterproductive, without any basis in fact or reality, and demonstrates the poverty of our foreign policy. Now I see again that we are threatening Syria with the same “no option is off the table.” This is apparently with respect to the belief that Syria may be furnishing scud missiles to Hezbollah. They probably are. We apparently believe that Hezbollah, Lebanon, Palestinians, and others have no right to arm themselves against known Israeli aggression. They are just supposed to meekly submit to Israel colonialism and genocide. U.S. involvement in the Middle East, always on the side of Israel, is absolutely despicable, and at least in principle opposed to what we claim are our basic values. Obama has asked Israel to stop building illegal housing units in Jerusalem in order to restart the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. Netanyahu has refused. What will Obama do? Put your money on the “nothing much” square.

It seems to be pretty much agreed and understood that the U.S. has been falling behind over time and is seemingly on its way to becoming a third-world (or worse) nation. We lag behind in education, technology, production, health care, infant mortality, and what have you. I think I have figured out why we are doing so poorly. In general it has to do with the fact that we have been systematically “dumbed down” through our inadequate educational system, our anti-intellectual ethos, and above all perhaps, our television. I think it has to do mostly with advertising, especially television advertising. Think about it, for years and years now we have been subjected to the most ridiculous, absurd, mind-deadening, infantile, idiotic, even surrealistic ads dreamed up by the minds of (probably) disturbed individuals who believe they are at the apex of business and creativity. Think of it, for as many years as you have been watching TV you have been exposed to chocolate chip cookies who drive cars and sing, bees that fly around and speak to you with an accent, cars that talk, animals that talk, even potholes that talk. There are people dressed as vitamins, carrots, turnips, bananas, and other fruits and vegetables, a bottle of beer having an affair with a sheaf of wheat, talking geckos, ducks, cows, horses, dogs, cats, blue bears wiping themselves in the woods with toilet paper, toys that dance and sing and come to life, babies that discuss their stock market investments, old people singing about their dentures, people dressed up as hamburgers, planets, and other things I cannot remember. The more TV you watch the more of this unreality you observe. Indeed, we watch so much of it, it has become normal, we accept it as part of our lives even though we probably don’t think about it. The TV programs are mind-deadening enough by themselves, but adding over time hours and hours of this total nonsensical irreality must be having an effect on us, numbing our brains, scrambling our thoughts, burrowing into our unconscious minds like parasitic worms that have found an apparently amenable host unaware of their insidious effects. Thus it is that we can listen to the likes of Limbaugh, Palin, Backmann, Hannity, O’Reilly, Beck, and others, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of their grotesquely distorted views of reality. It has by now all become just noise and more noise, the background against which we live in blissful ignorance of what used to be considered reality. I fear it has become true that from the point of view of an ordinary citizen there is no reality out there anymore, merely the incessant noise of the talking animals, cookies, cars talking heads and potholes that assail us daily, non-stop, and without mercy. We live, as Clifford Geertz suggested, “In webs of significance we ourselves have spun,” except ours are now webs of almost total insignificance.

LKBIQ:
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies

TILT:
Whereas Gar flesh is edible, Gar eggs are toxic.