the ballad of orange and grape

Sorry I'm late in posting this blog - My internet connection was dead for a day and I.T. Kid was nowhere to be found... it was like living in the last century, back in the days of dial up connections and text instead of pretty colorful pictures on the internet.
So here is my day-old post and another one for today - you get a two fer one.

Thursday:Once In A While NPR is worth listening to... usually it's when Terry Gross hosting 'Fresh Air'. She has the only NPR program left where I don't sense the constant pandering of propaganda.
On Wednesday, she and some poetry tout flogged a recording of poets reading their own poetry. (I know, Billie Collins, and it sounds like a great recording, actually.)

We were treated to a recording of Muriel Rukeyser reading her 'The Ballad of Orange and Grape.'
I can't find a copy of it on the 'net, so you'll have to buy the book, or Listen to the recording in the archives, here- you can skip ahead to 17:30 to just hear Orange and Grape read.

Chilling, relevant, prescient.
She begins in a cadence reminiscent of T S Eliot's The Hollow Men, then brings us right into the heart of darkness in her own average day.

Orangegrape. Who cares? Truth doesn't matter. Get used to it.

It made me recall:
“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” (1984, Orwell)

In 2002, WSJ reporter, Ron Suskind, wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine in which he relates a conversation he had with a senior White House aide:
"The aide says that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge, from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ...
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

....in other words, What are you going to believe: what you are told, or your own "lying eyes?"

...in other words, here's a little illustration ... earlier in the week, on Monday was it? the Pentagon released two video cam flicks of the Flight 77 running into the Pentagon, due to a FOIA request by Judicial Watch, an organization, btw, funded by the Scaifes.
I watched the generous 6 minutes of nothing, yawn, video and DID NOT see an airliner.
It did NOT match the Purdue University simulation that shows what it SHOULD have looked like.

So they really didn't give us anything, although what a picture of the airliner hitting the building would have to do with swaying a jury opinion one way or the other eludes me. It wouldn't give me any clue to the hijackers' capabilities, training or motivations. And the trial is over.

So, What truth are they so afraid of revealing? The families of the twin towers victims have seen freely shared pictures of those planes hitting the buildings hundreds of times, so you can't say you are protecting these families but not those families. It is not pictures of bodies, it is a picture of a building, a little streak of white, and then some fire.

And, I repeat, the pictures don't show anything new, that we didn't already have.
But here is my point:

For days BEFORE the release the big MSM news sources were posting pre-spun propaganda - Something along these lines: "these FOIA responses will finally put to rest the Loose Change/In Plane Sight Conspiracy Theories."

...in other words, should I believe the Made-For-TV-Movie and the official news "stenographers" touting the official PARTY LINE, or do I believe my lyin' eyes?

...and from the same above quoted book, Orwell's '1984':
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.”

Where is this leading?

Well, Now we are Officially Best Friends with Libya, and we have removed the Taliban from the official list of terrorist-supporting groups...

Blackwhite, orangegrape.

(Not Cuba, though. Poor Cuba is ALWAYS on the enemy list. No, never Cuba. Cuba who sends armies of teachers and doctors to conquer the world. Whose baseball team can't play for money, so they give their pay to charity. Cuba, whose leader was OFFENDED when he made the list of the world's richest men, and offered to quit if the magazine could show their accounting. Cuba who offered substantial humanitarian aid to Katrina ravaged New Orleans before FEMA did. Cuba, who seems to have a better record child health care than we do, even if we, the first world bully has tried for a century to blockade, boycott, and undermine them in every way imagineable, just because the had the cojones to want to rule themselves.)

'Nuf said?


Friday, to continue yesterday's theme:From Wikipedia, on 1984's version of events this week:

"The society of Oceania is sharply stratified into three groups, the small power-seeking Inner Party, the more numerous and highly indoctrinated Outer Party, and the large body of politically meaningless and mindless proles.
Except for certain rare exceptions like Hate Week, the proles remain essentially outside Oceania's political society.

Hate Week is an event ... designed to increase the hatred for the current enemy of the Party, whichever of the two opposing superstates that may be. Hate Week is officially celebrated from April 4th to April 10th.

During "Hate Week" (a week of extreme focus on the evilness of Oceania's enemies), Oceania and Eurasia are enemies once again. The public is quite blind to the change, and when a speaker, mid-sentence, changes the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia (speaking as if nothing had changed) the people are shocked as they notice all the flags and banners are wrong (they blame Goldstein and the Brotherhood) and quite effectively tear them down." ...thus demonstrating the interchangability of the two other superstates, and the ease with which the Party directs the hatred of its members."
Oceania is one of the three super-states in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,... On the global level, as "The Book" (supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein though in fact its descriptive part turns out to be endorsed by the Party) explains, the three powers eventually realized that continuous stalemate war was preferable to conquest, as war allowed them to spend their surplus labour manufacturing products that would be wasted during fighting, rather than improving people's standards of living (an impoverished population being easier to control than a rich one).
By the time the novel is set, the three powers have taken over most of the world, but a large area is still disputed between them. This area, containing the northern half of Africa, the Middle East, southern India, Indonesia, and northern Australia, provides slaves, or low-paid workers who are effectively slaves, for all three powers.

The powers rarely if ever fight on their own territory — Airstrip One (the official name of Great Britain) has become the target of Eurasian rocket bombs, but it is hinted that the Oceanian government itself may launch these weapons in order to convince the population that it is under constant attack.

The book... explains that the war cannot be won, and that its only purpose is to use up human labor and the fruits of human labor so that each superstate's economy cannot support an equal (and high) standard of living for every citizen. ... As the purpose of the war is to destroy manufactured products and thus keep the workers busy, obsolete and wasteful technology is deliberately used in order to perpetuate useless fighting.

Goldstein's book hints that in fact, there may not actually be a war. The only view of the outside world presented in the novel is through Oceania's media, which has an obvious tendency to exaggerate and even fabricate "facts". Goldstein's book suggests that the three superpowers may not actually be at war, and as Oceania's media provides scarcely believable news reports on impossibly huge military campaigns and victories (including an impossibly large campaign in the Sahara desert), it can be suggested that the war, in fact, is a lie.
However, as with many facets of the novel, the disputed existence of a war is neither confirmed nor denied, and the reader cannot be sure whether or not a war actually is in progress.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the other two powers themselves are fabrications, and the entire world is controlled by a single entity.
One essential consequence of doublethink is that the Party can rewrite history with impunity, for "The Party is never wrong." The ultimate aim of the Party is, according to O'Brien, to gain and retain full power over all the people of Oceania; he sums this up with perhaps the most distressing prophecy of the entire novel:

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever."