Media Smog Machine Versus US Electoral Majority

Imagine being in a big street fight with smoky exhaust blowing in your face.  That's what we face in every struggle for justice and freedom in a country and a world filled with the messages and images of a media so intent on showing us things that don't matter, starving us of truth, that they end up showing us the evil of banality.

Given that the government, directed by a few out to benefit at the expense of the many, is often the street gang we're up against, perhaps tear gas is a better metaphor than smoke.  I guess it would be hard to bring every person into a road construction site or a protest being beat down by thugs on public payroll, but trying to walk in an area where heavy things can hit you and grey smoke is in your eyes and obscuring your view is the best way I can think of to have people get the metaphor, and to face the harm done by bad media head-on.

Yeah, I'm asking you to give to the Fund for Authentic Journalism.  But my renewed thoughts on the media machine that seeks to disorient and disperse almost every move people make for more power over our lives comes from, finally, a famous name explaining how the 2004 U.S. election was stolen.

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Read it, by all means.  (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with on-the-ground reporting the corporate media refuses to do, affirms many of the sources I used in Kerry Wins Ohio and the Presidency, Counting Uncounted and Prevented Votes.)

No, winning an election, any election, is not the way to bring in and build the revolutionary changes we need to have liberty, justice, peace and prosperity for all (those tired words politicians dare to use one or a few at a time, but never to put seriously into practice).  But telling us who we voted for, and the media explaining how we think, is one of the ways they have for controlling us.

The worst-case scenario is not the people behind the Bush regime just stealing another election, but letting some Democrats in on the bounty of the new façade of democracy, hiding the election thievery and allowing concentrated power to rule without even that annoying requirement of actually fooling the people every time.

"Fortunately," the power-mad partisan secretaries of state, and the handful of Republicans that control the voting machines, are probably too insular and selfish to share (although Kennedy's article itself may force them too) and the new corruption of elections will, perhaps, be exposed.

But not easily.

Can't you see the talking points on TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, from Fox News to NPR, after Republicans maintain or increase their control of government in the 2006 elections, despite their own polls showing palpable disgust toward the party and its leaders?  "People weren't happy with Republican performance, but Democrats didn't convince them to try their way," which will be true and a lie at the same time.  Many, many people in no way convinced of anything by the Democrats are still voting for them as the only effective way to vote against the present management of the establishment.

Like every outrage perpetrated by this government, another apparently stolen election will be something to explain away rather than question.

Which tends to be the media's rôle under every government.  The past several elections, and probably the next several too, matter because they have attracted the efforts of the largest number of people who genuinely want more freedom and fairness (in the USA anyway) and a pull back from fascism-without-the-social-services (and to a lesser extent from imperialism, or at least colonialism).  The various calls to revolution do not have people's attention.  Elections (barely) do.

What would have happened in Ohio if at every place where people stood in two, three, or seven hour lines at the polls (overwhelmingly to vote Bush out; Blackwell's approved voters didn't have to wait)-- what if the true radicals, a loose sort of "Other Campaign" for these United States north of Mexico, brought these people a party?

Brought tents.

Brought food.

Brought music.

Brought new sources of news and ways of connecting to each other.

Brought offers of baby-sitting, running messages to work, and most of all brought a radical message that voting anyone in at the top won't be enough to change our lives for the better, that we have to organize from below?

This is hard to organize, especially if you have to vote yourself (though plenty of us in the U.S. are disenfranchised), but Free Press and others predicted the election wreck in Ohio.  And we should be ready for transforming gatherings of people anywhere and at all times into street parties, as part of any movement for justice and liberty.  For what can we do but find people who give a damn and bring a sampling of the revolution to them?

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