Gimme Some Truth, PLEASE
I'm Not Obsessed Or Fixated On Doom, Just In Finding Truth In A Distorted Landscape Shaped By Powerful Propaganda
“I'm sick and tired of hearing things from
Uptight short sided narrow minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
I've had enough of reading things
By neurotic psychotic pigheaded politicians
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
No short-haired, yellow-bellied
Son of tricky dicky's
Gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocket full of hopes
Money for dope, money for rope”
John Lennon
Gimme Some Truth
When John Lennon was tragically shot on December 8, 1980, I was working on a group project with students from a Communication class I was taking at James Madison University. Most people remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at that moment. We met at an off-campus apartment complex, and as we were working on the project and assigning our individual tasks, an announcement came in interrupting the Monday Night Football that was on the television in the background.
Monday Night Football was, at that time, a huge ratings grabber for ABC, and at a time before the internet and social media, guaranteed they had a captive audience. Millions of people watching were stunned into silence as one of the shows regular broadcasters, the iconic Howard Cosell, broke in to the running commentary to reveal the shocking news that John Lennon had been tragically murdered on the streets of New York City outside of his home.
It was a tragedy that reverberated instantaneously around the world on so many levels: the loss of an artistic genius, the loss of a once in a lifetime musical talent, the further loss of innocence, the loss of a poet, the loss of a man who used his fame to speak truth to power. Lennon’s influence through The Beatles, and his solo work, was in my generation’s DNA. The grief and shock were on par with the Kennedy assassination, or that of Martin Luther King.
Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, since the late 60s, were vocal supporters of the anti-war movement and had been outspoken against America’s involvement in Vietnam, and President Richard Nixon in particular. What we didn’t know at the time, and were not to find out until decades later, was that Lennon had been targeted by President Richard Nixon and the FBI.
Nixon, of course, reacted with the overreach and paranoia that typified his character as well as the remainder of his doomed Presidency, and he tapped the resources and power of the government’s top law enforcement agency to surveil, intimidate, and harass John Lennon. Nixon was pathologically obsessed with his fear of Lennon, demonizing him to the degree that he believed the music, literally, the words, and a tune, could bring down America, or more accurately, his version of what America should be.
He also used the Department of Immigration and Naturalization in an attempt to destroy Lennon’s newly found domestic bliss in his beloved New York City by attempting to deport him, using the pretext of a dubious former pot possession charge. Years later, Nixon left the White House in shame, and John Lennon retained his legal immigration status until his tragic, untimely death. This video is a great synopsis for those both familiar and new to the story.
It’s pure speculation on my part, but I think Nixon would have been delighted to see the level at which the government has allied with corporations, Big Tech, and social media to pervert a tool of information awareness and transform it into a major outlet of lies and deception. Certainly, his former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who is still witnessing it all, would have a lot to reveal to his former boss.
With each passing week, the corporate media, and their multiple echo chambers on major social media platforms, misinform us and try to dictate reality, despite our direct, day-to-day experiences telling us another story. It can drive a person who is largely isolated into bouts of self-doubt and mild insanity. In a sense aren’t we all in the dark to a degree? What can we REALLY know beyond what is in front of us that can be perceived? Yet, this level of obfuscation seems harmful and unprecedented.
I’m not talking about Meta, or its reverse-engineered offspring Facebook, specifically as a tool. This platform, like Tik Tok, has become, at least in my view, a realm of narcissism and advertisement for people who have been duped into happily adapting to the “new normal”. I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious, but I simply can no longer bring myself to dabble in the inane. It literally feels uncomfortable. Up until a couple of months ago, I felt compelled to share articles about, for example, the expansion of the war, or alarm at the abandonment of sensible COVID policy only to be met with an embarrassing silence. Specifically, if “likes” are any indication of the success or failure of the feedback, I got zero response. No one cares unless you can entertain them and help them escape, it seems. I understand this to a degree, people are psychologically tapped and have reached their limits. Pretending everything’s great and posing for selfies isn’t going to solve anything either. Especially when we only have ourselves to depend on.
There is some good news in the battle to try to stop censorship by Big Tech and the Government: The Department Of Homeland Security backed off of its Orwellian proposal to create a disinformation policing “board” which was to be headed up by the animated and vibrant, but distinctly unqualified, Nina Jankowicz. Specifically, the implementation of the board has been “paused”. What this actually means, of course, is that the game is not over, only that the clock is stopped as the players huddle up to devise a new strategy.
Jankowicz wasted no time at all hitting the corporate media circuit to reveal that the problem with lanching the disinformation board was, ironically, disinformation. According to Jankowicz, it was a benign, inoffensive effort designed to help, not hurt. NPR, like all compliant corporate media of late, was more than willing to give DHS and Jankowicz time to air their grievances with no pushback or counterview.
“Basically, everything you may have heard about the Disinformation Governance Board is wrong or is just a flat out lie. The board was quite simple and anodyne. What it wanted to do was to coordinate among the Department of Homeland Security's components — agencies like FEMA or the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency or Customs and Border Patrol — and make sure that Americans had trustworthy information about issues connected to homeland security.
But we weren't going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently, we were doing it to the best of our ability, and we were doing it in a way that respected privacy, civil rights, civil liberties and, most importantly, the First Amendment.”
So literally deciding what is disinformation, and allowing or disallowing access to it isn’t related to speech. Got it. Feels like truth avoidance at best, and a lie at worst. Color me skeptical.
Looming on the horizon: increased potential for, or already occurring, multiple existential crises in the form of a global nuclear conflict, food shortages due to drought, economic collapse, supply chain issues, the collapse of retail earnings, fuel shortages, and the collapse of the housing market. Could be, we are told calmly by ”rational” economic experts, indicators of a recession, while more truthful, honest analysts are calling it what it likely is: a collapse of key systemic elements of capitalism leading to depression.
I am simultaneously horrified and outraged at the level of recklessness, stupidity, and inane cheerfulness with which war narratives are being spun, starting at the top.
Despite an increasingly desperate situation right here at home, with failure to uphold social spending legislation and campaign promises on the most basic level, the “party of the people”, The Democrats, are bragging about their “accomplishments”: reduced deficit spending, low unemployment, and job creation, as if it were some purposely created, well designed, economic miracle to benefit the people.
Without blinking, and proudly trumpeted as a positive, Biden and Pelosi, two “leaders” past their prime and out of their element, send billions to Ukraine. They create their own reality just as they did in the Bush administration. All for a noble cause of course. Even the “progressive” members of “The Squad” have sold their souls to campaign donors and the Military-Industrial complex. This is a dramatic transformation in perception and priorities, but they have yet to tweet anything in weeks.
If Republicans are fascist, authoritarian, and far-right, the Democrats are breathlessly running sprints to catch up with them. This has been a trend for YEARS. We essentially, now and going forward, have a fascist duopoly that serves their donors and themselves. You can’t vote that away. At least, not without more options.
The one thing that the MIC, Biden, and the Democrats (and to be fair, The Republicans before them in Iraq) can’t allow is any challenge to their pre-constructed narratives about war, ones that are as free of fact as the greatest narratives of fiction are. I suppose the “greatest hits”, that Ukraine is about the defense of freedom and democracy, are not sticking well with the public consciousness and are losing their resonance. Obviously, it’s a tired and ineffective sale pitch. They now have to reach into the garbage can of sensationalism and unverified rumor to make their points. I suppose it’s a reaction to a recent poll says an overwhelming majority of Americans (72%) think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Whenever there is doubt about the purity of motives, compliant corporate media are more than willing to step up and add to the disinformation. Someone should have paused to ask Nina Jankowicz if any of the following qualify as disinformation, or if it’s only Russia that is the source of all that is disinformation. The tried, and (un)true tactics of demonizing the enemy are brought forward. This has happened in everything from the unverified torpedo strike in the Gulf Of Tonkin that ignited the escalation of the Vietnam war, to the lies about WMDs in Iraq, and currently, a new level of horror in Ukraine: child rape by the Russian Army.
No doubt, horrible things have, and will happen in the pursuit of war. The problem with the rape allegations is that multiple media have uncritically reported, and worse, repeated the allegations that are exclusively sourced to the Ukrainian government.
I’m not sure what sort of addled thinking is behind current ideas to siphon leftover funds from COVID mitigation and divert them to more police, but, at least the insanity of this policy-driven sociopathy has a consistent logic. Biden and The Democrats were so fixated on war spending, that they literally separated future spending on COVID mitigation, like so much trash, from the Ukraine bill. So now with the advent of Monkeypox spreading internationally as a new variant of concern, Biden and The Democrats are talking about austerity in diesase control. Money for war is available in hours, while money for disease mitigation is no longer guranteed. It’s simply not a priority.
Again, it all makes sense in the context of the avid pursuit of war spending: Whether people die as a result of nuclear war, COVID, Monkeypox, or Long Covid, whether multiple children need liver transplants as a result of damage done by hepatitis, whether people die on the streets from the stress of being unsheltered and hungry doesn’t matter. They simply don’t care. They try to hide the truth and reality of the harm they actively pursue as they chop away at public health and economic security, but now, it should be obvious that they simply don’t care.
They can’t talk to us like adults anymore, they have to lie to keep the faithful who believe in them as saviors.
Call me paranoid, and I’m certainly not running over to check out what Glenn Beck and Alex Jones have to say, but there is something going on at a very deep, existential level, and the governments of the West have been co-opted entirely. We won’t get a good perspective of what is going on, and what we are being sacrificed for until the coming months unfold.
Good luck to all of us in trying to seek truth and some degree of sanity.