Tail Bobbing a Checkerboard Cue-ball...

Sometimes I really am just plain dumb.  I should have understood this decades ago.  Oh, well.  No time like the present to correct the situation. The focus of my fubar has to do with the ongoing covert cultural warfare being waged against my nation, to be specific a class of cultural mutagens being used as weaponry by those who wish to degrade a culture evolved in and from democracy to the point it will accept any of several possible forms of totalitarian tyranny. 

 

It’s a fact of life that people carry grudges (grudges, for lack of a better and more precise word) against certain things.  The grudges people carry but never really recognize for what they are, the ones that aren't fully acknowledged, the ones that float right there at the top of the subconscious are some of the most powerful.  Any shrink will tell you that, a great deal of their work is in exposing that sort of grudge to the light of day so someone can deal with it in a rational manner rather than let it beat up their life and the lives of those around them. 

When you back up and look at people as a whole what is to be noticed is the focus of those grudges fall out into categories: with the parents, their elders, a church, the education establishment, the other gender, the law and the social order it represents, the boss and the drama politics of the workplace.  Categories.  There’s only so many basic categories of course, the count of those categories will be close to the count of the authority figures present as folks grow up.  Why?  Because it is authority misused that creates a grudge, but more on that later.

Have an individual feel wronged by some member of any of these categories, a wrong never set right, and you've got a good chance of them forming a grudge with the whole category.  If this were an essay on mental health I’d have appended “with all the attending problems to be expected as a consequence of an irrational bias against an entire segment of life rather than the actual villain of the scenario” to the previous sentence.  But this is not an essay on mental health, this is an essay on how what has been learned of mental health has been bastardized into the weapons of cultural warfare.

What has (finally!!!) dawned on me is that the nature of these grudges will of necessity be very, very major players in defining which approach will be most effective in influencing folks.  You don’t use a volt-ohmmeter to torque down a set of head bolts, you don’t persuade a person carrying a grudge against a parent’s sexual hypocrisy to go to the parent’s church using the arguments of repressive religion.  Of course not, you tailor your approach such that their grudges support your agenda rather than oppose it, so that they never see how their grudges are pushing them in the direction you want.

Ok, bright but not blinding.  Just common sense when you sit down to play the enemies’ hand for him. The real value of our grudges (for the enemy) is that they make it so very easy to engineer internally divisive “us and them” scenarios almost at will to weaken a land and a people when they’ll be needing their combined strengths to contest your very real agenda of converting their freedom into a subservient oriental style caste-and-class structure similar to the one the founding father’s drop kicked a couple of centuries ago.

Say what?  How would that work?  It works because there are those who fully understand about the different types and categories of grudges, how they get created, how carrying this or the other kind of grudge generally effects a life.  Courtesy of the folks who do the statistics it isn't all that hard to take a pretty good guess as to how many people fall under each category, and how deeply impacted their lives most likely are by the grudges they carry.

Contemplate the work of the advertising industry, the commercial dreamweavers.  Look at how they, more than any other, define for society what no one wants to be associated with.  The model holding Brand X is svelte, sophisticated, gorgeous, the model in the background who is buying Brand Y simply... pretty.  Obviously insecure and unsure of herself, but still, pretty.  The guy buying truck ABC looks like he knows what to do with a truck like that, the wahoo in brand DUH is obviously a city slicker never had mud on his boots much less the frame of his truck.  Unless of course the advertising is into an urban market where the roles are, for obvious reasons, reversed.  You get the picture.  You may not be buying a truck, but... the comparison remains in place.

Contemplate that the same kind of folks who advertise the toothpaste and the automobiles also work for political campaigns, likely enough to work for a politician is a bit of an honor in that world.  After all, when you’re advertising a politician, a political mode of thought you don’t get to start your own campaign, you have to step into one that’s been running for a long, long time and make it work. Takes someone with a particular kind of skill to make that happen. Side effect of partisan politics and all that jazz. 

So when your job is to advertise a politician what do you use to take the place of Brand Y, truck DUH? You don’t need to worry about that, that’s been set up for you.  The demographics you’re advertising to have been being gently herded for the last half a century or so to where they’re already standing in nice neat rows representing their category of grudge.  You already know what they don’t like, what they don’t want to be or be seen as.  Knowing that is what you’re given, that’s the continuity between the election cycles, between the campaigns.  You’re job is to use that information to convince some critical five percent to change their mind into voting for your boy Joe Blow over the incumbent Harvey Tucanphuequer, and one of the major ways you’re going to do this is by making them believe Joe will put down a little hard justice where the insult and injury that produced their grudge makes its’ home.

Maybe Joe really will bring a little justice, more likely he won’t, but in any case what you’re going to be doing is putting some heavy spin on everything you can gain access to in order to convince someone he will.  You’re going to be using some heavy spin, and you’re going to do your dead level best to make sure no one sees the kind of spin you’re using.  There’s a reason the cue ball is pure white, you wouldn't want it painted like a checkerboard so everyone could see your style now would you?  Of course not.  No, what you’re going to be doing is presenting your boy with flash and dash, making your boy a regular James Bond battling whatever injustice produced the majority of the grudges so they’ll vote for him instead of Harvey.  That’s the nature of your job, that’s why you get paid the big bucks for making happen.

What’s the big deal you say?  This is just the nature of partisan politics in the information age.  Did you really think this was something new, something we didn't already know?  You’re right, this isn't anything new. What’s bothering me is this:  what happens when the game escalates a notch and the madmen ad men who really do have such power in our world decide creating synthetic grudges is a good way to be assured they themselves remain the power behind the powers?  

Why would they want to do that?  Easy answer.  The kind of grudges I’ve been talking about share one attribute in common: they’re all the grudges that in one form or fashion put a standing and conventional authority in the villains’ role.  What do they have to work with, particularly here in six shooter cowboy America that reveres the solitary hero, to counter all those anti-authority grudges when they want to push the idea of Orwellian authority run Draconian cruel as a good thing?  When some among them were unethical enough, or greedy enough, to accept a contract to sell the American people on the idea of passively giving up their freedom? How do you convert a cowboy into a coolie before you've run him out of ammunition and turned him into a corpse where he’s of no value at all? 

Yea... right.  That gets just all kinds of convoluted in a great big hurry.  Could easily turn into a scenario where the tail wagged the dog so hard the poor damn dog died of whiplash.  

Could it be done?  I’m afraid so, and not so terribly hard, not in this digital day and age when more people internalize the emotional structure and content of their lives from what they've received via some form of media outlet (TV, major internet news providers, etc et all) than from real events in their world of real life.  And those media outlets?  If they’re not owned by the same people who hired Joe Blow and Harvey Tucanphuequer (to represent them in Government circles) they’re damn sure sponsored by that same bunch buying the advertising those media outlets sell which just gives the Mighty Tail that much more leverage to work from. 

I could speculate on how they might approach such a campaign, but I won’t.  Don’t want to risk giving them any ideas.

The epiphany isn't the existence of grudges, the epiphany is how easy it has been for the enemy to create-to-manipulate grudges to fill this function.  Perhaps even to easy, perhaps so easy that over the years they've gotten a bit careless, perhaps even careless enough to leave a trail of circumstantial evidence leading back to the source.  That is if enough people are willing to engage with their own grudges, set those unhappy barriers out in plain sight (at least to themselves) where it will be easily visible should some external voice attempt to install those sentiments for a fulcrum to leverage some compromise of ethics or morality or political good judgment.

Gentle reader of whatever political persuasion you might be, push the limits of your courage and understand your own grudges, we all have them in greater or lesser degree, understand them and if nothing more defend your right to endure a grudge of your own choosing rather than be afflicted by grudges chosen for you!  Be alert within yourself, and share one to the other any sentiments that feel like a grudge forming to no event in your real life, but rather something being painted over your life, something that when you actually look at it feels like an act of ethical rape being planted within you!  If nothing else let’s cooperate in bobbing that damn tail that wags the dog so our democracy has half a chance of maintaining true freedom in the world.  It isn't automatic you know, it is quite possible for a democracy to vote its’ way back into slavery.