Old Hippie

There's a line in the movie version of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" where the state-run media propaganda machine states that "42,600 repetitions constitutes one truth." The point being that the more often a lie is repeated, the more believeable it becomes. Repeat the lie often enough and it becomes the truth. That was the business of the state in this story, that of rewriting history to show their government in a positive light. In this case, the state had calculated exactly how many repetitions of a lie it would take to make it an indisputable truth. Wonderful reasoning, isn't it?

That reasoning is alive and thriving in the United States of America today. Bush lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush manipulated the intelligence to force us into a war. None of these things are true yet you would be hard pressed to find media reports to the contrary. The mainstream media promotes the mantra of the repetitive, indeed they are the repeaters, just as the mass media was in Brave New World. People believe the media, after all, they have access to information that no one else knows, right? And it is their job to inform us of the truth, right?

The truth has become something other than the truth. Today's truth is on an individual level. We have personal truths now. My truth may be different than yours. It's all good. It's also all bullshit!

How ridiculous a notion that there is such a thing as personal truth. Because you see something differently than I do does not mean that we are both correct in what we believe and that truth can be divvied up, a little bit here and there, and we can each have our own little piece of truth that is far different than reality. That's absurd. There is only one truth!

The world is a place of black and white. Stating that the sun sets in the east and rises in the west, no matter how matter times you repeat it, does not change the simple truth that the sun sets in the west and rises in the east. It does not set in the east for some and in the west for others. One cannot look at the truth in any other way except as the truth. The only truth. No matter what you believe to be true. Most everyone thought the world was flat before Columbus. It was considered the truth. But just because people believe it as the truth didn't make it so.

Every politician, every intelligence agency, every nation that looked at the intelligence about the weapons capabilities in Iraq came to the same conclusion, that there were WMDs in Iraq and that they would be used somewhere, sometime. It was Bill Clinton's stated policy for regime change in Iraq. There was mass consensus that Iraq with Saddam running the show, was a definite and immediate threat to the stability of the modern world. At one point in time, there was no doubt about this truth.

It is only after the fact, when it became politically expedient for all of the Bush haters in the country, that the process of repeating a lie over and over again to make it become the new truth began. The only reason for this contemptible action that I can see is for political advantage, power, the ability to remain a privileged politician for as long as humanly possible, no matter what they have to do to achieve it.

Politicians like this are nothing more than prostitutes for power. While in Brave New World, it was a state-run media campaign that blared out the new truths over loudspeakers and televisions placed throughout the city, in today's world the media is not controlled by the state at all. But that fact would be difficult to surmise if you were looking at this country from without. Such as, how the terrorists look at us.

From an outside point of view, it appears as if the voice of the media is also the voice of the government. Truly it is the liberal politicians receiving most of the media praise and attention and they are all too happy, both the media and the politicians, to have such a perfect marriage of ideas and such a loud voice to blast out those ideas.

Conservatives in this country, perhaps by their very nature, do not engage in much name-calling or outright rebuttals to ludicrous, idiotic rantings of the liberal politicians or media. Conservatives don't play the personal truth game very well. They also do not organize very well. This leaves conservative as perfect targets for group-hugging liberals who desire to mold the world into their version of Utopia. Can't we all just get along?

The media always looks for ratings and tends to ignore stories that aren't sensational enough. Look at any coverage of a major catastrophe, such as hurricane Katrina, and it becomes obvious that sensationalism in reporting is the norm for today's journalists. The truth is simply not important. Ratings are.

And that's the way it has become for our politicians. Ratings, or votes, trump the truth every time. And that is a sad state of affairs for such a great country!

Say it with me, "The truth is not changeable. The truth is not changeable. The truth is not changeable." Only 42,597 repetitions to go. :<)

OH