When I first started writing online I immediately found it to be an enormous influence upon lifestyle and sanity. My first publication was a Maine-focused satirical journal entitled, Maine Before Dawn. The title was a take-off of a popular but drab Maine radio talk-show entitled Maine in the Morning. I think it still airs. Maine Before Dawn has been defunct since 9-11 when I wrote what I really thought and was hosed from Yahoo! Geocities for a violation of their draconian user-agreement. Some of the many dozens of weekly issues are still online on an archive site. And, they still stand the test of time.
The influence of the Net upon all of us and everyone else too has been, to make a Yogi Berra-like under-statement, like being reborn on a different planet. This is not the geeky old days of local dial-up bulletin board systems. The alternative media is a force to be reckoned with, and, not surprisingly, every attempt is being made to reckon with it. The Net could choose the next President, just the same as it could derail The New American Century nightmare that got its terror show on the road with 9-11.
One thing we all have to keep in mind, is that eventually the Net will be reckoned with, and in some draconian fashion no doubt. Until then, keep your six-guns on your hips, loaded and the hammers pulled back. Because, the day when it's all gone, morphed into a quisling pandering of the past, it'll be too late to start thinking about what you would've done to save it.
One of the big problems with the Net right now is that it truly is turning into the mass media. As a mass, human beings are easily fooled into plummeting off a cliff together.
There's been a lot of encouraging words about Rosie O'Donnell having come out of the 9-11 Truth Movement closet. And some are even beginning to think, she's championing the 9-11 Truth Movement.
Be careful folks. This is a television personality of the most unlikely sort, and there's no doubt Ms O'Donnell has been on her knees before while getting to where she's profoundly found herself. Consider the effect if she suddenly becomes disenchanted with the truth, and comes out as a traitor to the cause with an interview of some disingenuous wacko who aptly portrays the whole shebang as nothing more than a bunch of lies and fantasies. The 9-11 Truth Movement would be buried so deep, it's be gone like Dorothy's Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.
Rosie O'Donnell is not the 9-11 Truth Movement. She is a television personality. And someone has to say that before it's too late.
The lifestyle and mindset changes the Net has imposed upon writers and readers alike is an overwhelming phenomenon. I get up every morning and read my email, peruse the spam to be sure I'm not missing anything. (Mine's big enough thank you, and, I wouldn't want it any bigger for fear it might be mistaken for something I was smuggling the next time I fly, if I ever fly again.) And then like so many here, I go to the BBC and read the World News. I like the BBC World News, but, mostly because the Brits have no sense of shame about the lies they publish. So, it's easy to discern and read through all their lies to find some instinct for the actual truth, if such a dubious thing exists.
This morning I found the following articles being prominently ticker-taped across the BCC headlines, each written to catch every naive readers' click-finger unaware:
"LATEST: A public beta of highly-anticipated game Halo 3 will start on 16 May." Get a life kids. I mean, who really cares?
"LATEST: Car bomb kills at least five people near Baghdad university." Really? Okay, I guess the Iraq war has finally gone too far in numbing the masses into complacency about what is transpiring there, as well as our feelings about whom it is that is really doing it.
"LATEST: Ethiopia admits holding 41 terror suspects but denies torture allegations." The CIA is certainly taking an interest in bringing democracy and western ideas into the African countries. There must be oil involved somewhere nearby.
"LATEST: Nepal's army begins storing weapons in key stage of country's peace process." Peace process? Storing weapons for a peace process? Uh oh... I don't like the sound of that one bit. It sounds pretty ominous. Maybe peace is a bad idea after all.
This is what the Net is doing to all of us. And Rosie O'Donnell is just a drop in the bucket that has seeped out of a hole in the bottom from which so much humming and clickity-clacking background noise increases our sure sense we are staying alive. In the minds of most Rosie O'Donnell is just like Don Imus having slurred the Rutgers University women�s basketball team calling them "nappy-headed ho�s." It's all nothing more than a passing waft in the stream of our subconscious. It's perhaps better likened to the smells on an urban subway. You remember those smells, but you do it all the while hoping not to recall them too specifically.
I'm sorry folks. One cannot expect much more or less from a radio show personality like Don Imus, or, from a television personality like Rosie O'Donnell. Everything in this world is staged for an effect. Don Imus, Rosie O'Donnell, George W. Bush, and even the Nazi Youth Pope Benedict XVI. They are all created for our consumption, and, the effect of that continuous consumption. It's called culture. And, that's the way culture works. Create the consumption of myths. Expose the myths. Make it all seem like truth by exposing what is false about all of it, that which has no substance to begin with. And, that's what passes for logic in our feeble human brains.
I'll say it again. That is what passes for logic in our feeble human brains. If you're encouraged by any of it, you are just setting yourself up to look foolish later on. But, no one is looking. That foolish look is only apparent when you look in the mirror. But that is the point, here. Life isn't measured by the time we spend looking in the mirror. It's about the real emotions we feel when we're not inspecting our own often sucker-punched egos.
What is going to pull the bucket over so many of our heads will be the upsurge in Rosie O'Donnell wanna-bees who will join the 9-11 Truth Movement. Oh God! Let me hide from what is coming, Dear Lord! Please don't let me live that long! Puh-lease!
PUH-LEASE!!!! Life is like that. PUH-LEASE!!!! It is so easy to be embarrassed by events as they unfold. We grow up and look back. What was I thinking? And, in the mean times, the much meaner times, the population still keeps growing out of control, wars rage on, pollution increases, and someone has stepped over another boundary that should never have been trespassed upon.
I when remember the Freewheelin' cut Masters of War came out. I remember how struck I was by the hatred of the last words of the final stanza:
And I'll stand over your grave - 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.
I'd never in my life heard such hatred, such righteous hatred. And I, like so many others, was enchanted. I learned to hate like that myself. It was 1963, and I was 13 years old. In retrospect, why would any 13 year old feel the way I felt experiencing such hatred for the first time?
I'll say it again. That is what passes for logic in our feeble human brains, and no less especially the human brain of a 13 year old. I'd have made an excellent child-soldier. I was a natural born killer, just like the rest of us.
Today, I try not to dwell on it. Oh, sure I still have the hatred. Everyone does. But, I take more solace about my humanity as I whistle the beautifully haunting western melody of To Ramona. (Watch it on YouTube.)
Ramona would be an old lady today, and perhaps not much to look at. Such are all our short lives. Still, I'll bet Ramona still brings tears to the eyes of someone.
And, I'll say it again, and, again. That is what passes for logic in our feeble human brains. We are all romantics at heart, emotional romantics.
So, right now it is time to stop supporting the troops and instead, support the braver men and women who are deserters from this hideous war of aggression that we were all lied into for the benefit of Big Oil.
Life is too short to let it end in such a war. All the child-soldiers who patriotically enlisted after 9-11 have become good and even excellent killers, like the young John McCain, the young John Kerry and the young Lieutenant Calley. None of them deserve our support when there are braver men and women deserting and facing the sure Kafkaesque consequence of growing up the hard way. They are growing up Catch-22.
"Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes..."
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
