Grass Valley Report

The puzzling question these days seems to be how can we accurately critique incompetence? When John Dean broke stride with Nixon during Watergate, he was seen as ‘the Judas’ of Nixon’s cabinet. Generations later, a tyranny of silence passively condones the banishment of whistle blowers making them examples of what happens when you “rock the boat.” People in power have been demonizing dissent for a long time but they’ve never been able to count on the consensus making ability that contemporary media can create. We see the winner of a political campaign as the one who can afford the most TV spots, not necessarily the one who carried the day with a just cause.

With so many people vicarious about their expressions of courage, it’s hard to make an appeal to common sense. Our insights have become so muddled by media that we are almost certain not to trust ourselves. In an article on global warming versus terrorism, George Monboit writes in The Guardian:

"Why are we transfixed by terrorism, yet relaxed about the collapse of the conditions that make our lives possible? One reason is surely the disjunction between our expectations and our observations (the suspension of disbelief).

And this leads us, I think, to a further reason for turning our eyes away. When terrorists threaten us, it shows that we must count for something, that we are important enough to kill. They confirm the grand narrative of our lives, in which we strive through thickets of good and evil towards an ultimate purpose. But there is no glory in the threat of climate change."

The battle between good and evil is only a box office away. With fixed fights like “Rocky”, “Million Dollar Baby”, and “Mission Impossible” that engage our adrenals as if we are about to take it on the chin ourselves, we turn over power to those who eventually make us pay for our suspension of disbelief. If we substitute ‘naively accept’ for suspension of disbelief we might wonder why we don’t wonder more. Such manufactured certainties are not strange to us. We have come to personally think in sound bytes, addictively acting out the cues media arbitrators use to occupy our instincts of fight/flight. We continue to believe that entertainment will somehow provide an escape from the gnawing feeling that we are, in fact, more hollow from the deathless pyrotechnics (special effects) that create these disjunctions between our expectations and our observations. If we don’t see the coffins returning from Iraq, the dead soldiers are only numbers.

Governance itself has become a voyueresque event. “Don’t worry,” we’re told, “We’ll have a committee do an investigation on that matter.” And what will they do with the findings? In other times there would be public outrage and heads would roll. Often morality’s failing is it’s inaccessibility to the patently obvious. Enter talk news and anyone can be an expert. When Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” I don’t think he had Fox News or Hollywood in mind.

In a pre-inaugural address George Bush talked of the “capital” this recent election afforded him in his second tenure. Lets take a look at some of that “capital” (the dollar has lost 30% of its value against the Euro in the last 3 years.) that George Bush has said that he intends to spend.

As of this year and in the coming decade, the USA is no longer the breadbasket of the world. Brazil/South America has not only surpassed the US, they are doing it more scientifically and with no limit in potential growth and usable land. Most of these changes in Brazil have happened in the last 4 years. While Bush is doing “weapons of mass destruction” and invading Iraq, the players and the playing field have changed. Bankable certainties that were unquestioned in America are now monitored by paranoiacs (not visionaries) in Washington who play with toy soldiers from the frustrated farms in America that can no longer compete with these new players. No longer is the question “Why don’t they like us anymore?” Now that we know that they don’t what are they doing about it? When it’s only war that we can make it’s no longer a question of American know-how.

The only North American commodity that is constantly in the picture is the price of oil, and that is the alleged capital from which the hedges on futures that control scarcity come from. The US peaked out on oil in the seventies so these promises are another form of paper speculation that is unsubstantiated by inventory i.e., imports. As the weapons industry expends mayhem to provoke favorable prices in those paper commodities, the Brazilians have developed a way of running their cars on sugar/alcohol.

As this Bush capital that has been predicted by neocon madness evokes pastoral consent on the 700 Club, it’s a matter of time before the shrinking dollar will be called in for its inherent incapacity to stand for anything. It is then that the religious right will have to come up with some loaves and fishes as the buying power of the dollar and the price of oil will definitely be looking for a face lift. Since the majority of recent victories have been media fictions, it’s hard to guess just what those commodities are that are meant to collateralize that capital. The two benchmark corporations of America, Boeing and General Motors, are no longer able to compete and the rust belt is threatening to extend to Seattle as corporations rush to get off shore. The Chinese and the Japanese now manufacture practically everything and the taxes meant to payback the bad loans for all these imports have been forgiven for the wealthy. The promised T-Bonds that are meant to exchange value for goods are looking like fiat promises as the dollar collapses to record lows each day. It doesn’t make sense to have a credit card any longer and those who still do are helping to send up a balloon that is substantiated by more obscene borrowing on the federal government’s part. Unless rapture is an excuse for getting out of our current debt service, we are going to have to pay our debts. Ad on to that the failure of American Foreign policy under the Bush Administration, the religious right’s passing the plate for Israel and it shouldn’t be any surprise that the rest of the world is looking for a different drummer.