The Movie Truth

I just had a chance to watch this movie today. It's the big screen rendition of Mary Mape's book "The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power."

It is an interesting contrast to watch this movie, and then read the various critical reactions to it. I personally found the movie to be quite entertaining, as well as a bit disheartening.

I get the point made by some of the critics of the movie that it tries to gloss over the essential point that the documents were subject to a good deal of doubt, and this was an error Mapes and Rather should have been more sensitive to. The corroborative evidence, however, surrounding the facts of Bush's supposed service in the Air National Guard were pretty solid; especially with the several officials who actually spoke on camera about it (other than Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett's testimony) .

These were seasoned reporters who had to have had a good grip on what made a story valid and truthful or they wouldn't have gotten to the position of respect that they had attained prior to this. And there was a lot that was valid, at least as far as the essential point of the shenanigans that took place to give Bush that cushy out from actually serving his country in Vietnam.

The disheartening part of this is how easy it can be to use one aspect of a body of truth to obfuscate the rest of it. Were the documents manufactured as bait precisely so as to make the reporters jump prematurely? Who knows. Maybe, maybe not. Don't forget that one of the officers involved who wouldn't appear on camera did validate the general thrust of what the disputed documents contained. From my perspective its just damned hard not see the air guard appointment as anything other than privilege at work. And let us also not forget that Bush would have been disgraced enough to lose the election for his second term if something hadn't come up to cast at least some doubt on the charges.

Even more disheartening still, however, is the basic fact of what has happened to information, and how it now is automatically held in suspicious contempt as far as any link it might have to "truth." This is so because in today's world everybody has an angle to work, or an ax to grind, in what they let go forth into the infosphere as information. Truth used to be the first casualty of every war but now we are in the business of permanent war. As such truth is just another theatre of operations to conduct that constant conflict in, and information the main weapon. How convenient for the powerful.

A New Way to Pay and, Hopefuly, Forget

Money guilt. This exists and I'm not here to try and pretend it doesn't. You do have to admit, however, that in the grand scheme of things it is one aspect of wealth that is difficult, at best, to feel much sympathy over. After all, the obvious solution to rid one's self of the problem for good would take nothing more than one check to the charity of choice.

Isn't it grand, however, how inventive the commercial minded can be when a need can be seen as another source of profit? Just rid yourself of a bit of the source of your anxiety and we will talk you through the guilt! Reassurance on a stick if ever there was one. What better charity could there be, while still upholding the bedrock values that make money worth having in the first place? By god, if that doesn't make you feel proud to be a mercantile I have no idea what else could. That's having whatever you consider as a "hot" person rip your shirt off, wip you gently with mink striped, "cat-o-nine tails," and have you yell "not mea culpa, not mea culpa." All while making the best use of whatever you consider is your happy stick as well.

Wealth Therapists Help The 1% With Their Money Guilt

Cruz Isn't Nearly Whacko Enough to Deserve Treatment in My New Wing of the Betty Ford Clinic for the Reality Challenged

And until he can prove he is he better well shut up and go home or I'll put a Bitch Slap of stupidity on him he won't ever forget; assuming he can still remember the name of the game at all of course.

Trump Suggests He Could Sue Over Cruz's Presidential Eligibility

The Problem is, That's the Problem

I am growing fonder of one of the toss off lines in my "Chelsea Does Philosophy" screenplay post. You see it here in the title of this one.

A one issue candidate may seem like a rather narrowly focused individual, where aspirations of being president are concerned. It's certainly a no brainer that there many pressing issues facing us now as a nation, and each has its own litany of injustice, and/or suffering, to sustain its being ranked highly in any hierarchy of priorities.

The problem, though, really does get complicated by the one factor they all share: the inordinate amount of power that Big Money wields in not only thwarting solutions to virtually all of them, but in how it also often works quite diligently at making them worse.

But the problem with the problem of this situation as expressed by even Mr. Sanders, is that it does not want to recognize the real "primary" problem all developed nations now face. You can't continue to support the economic model that makes "Big Money" possible if you truly want to do something about the inordinate power of same.

And please bear in mind here that its not just that a model, born of the mechanistic thinking of typography, that's been mutated by the electrified environments of instant information flow. It is also the effect on how we think, and conceive, of the world around us, that have been changed as well. Now we must contend with multi dimensional matrices of simultaneous interaction. Realities of integration that make the subtle interdependencies in complex systems a given. The old economic model is simply flying apart under the strain, and we are made ever more crazy as well.

Recognizing that elephant in the room has proven to be quite discomforting for pretty much everybody; myself included (where I've had my own little comic opera of tragedy, bouncing around in various states of disbelief, terror, and feeling sorry for myself; I still can't believe that this fell to me to try and articulate, or that I stumbled over it in the first place. It's certainly been out there for everyone to see after all).

The real bottom line here is the actual "primary" choice we've been avoiding for far too long. Will we choose to do something about the need for a fundamentally new way to go about living now, or will we continue to live in that river in Egypt; waiting for the final conflagration of willful ignorance, and damned fools, that so many of same have been fantasizing about for so long. There's tragedy and injustice of the first order for you.

Clinton Attacks Sanders as 'Single Issue Candidate' in Milwaukee Debate

And People Who Make Mistakes Without Taking Ownership

I bring this painful reminder of how a good portion of us still die to illustrate the point that, bad as foreign enemies might be in doing us harm, we still do a great deal of same to ourselves. And yet, is this fact truly reflected in how we prioritize threats? Do we expend national resource commensurate with this reality? I think not.

How could we when it is already becoming clear how challenged we are to even agree on what reality is in the first place. But then, as it always is, in whose best interest is it to have such agreement, or not. Just as you might ask whose interest is served in our current distribution of priorities. In that context even a shitty business man is better than a liberal, or a socialist, whatever their gender might be.

What's Killing Americans? Guns, Cars and Drugs

Even a Shitty Business Man, Who Still Has Money, Can Dream of Being President

And why not him, even if he isn't the most shitty business man who's ever come down the pike? The one thing you can say for him is that he certainly knows how to force march his way to ever bigger and better mistakes. And what more could our brand of insanity ask for in a leader? And by God you won't ever have to worry about him having any doubts about his own greatness rubbing off a bit on our great nation.

I say damn the reality hand wringers and full speed ahead. We can use another good rush as we launch ourselves into grand oblivion!

FEB 10 2016, 9:28 PM ET

Trump Makes Electability Pitch in First Rally Since N.H. Primary Win

Reporting on Absurdity, Straight Faced and Serious

You really have to hand it to news reporters sometimes. How they can manage to take what would ordinarily be a SNL skit, a Jon Stewart bit, or a Colbert Report, and make it seem like it was a serious bit of reality is just amazing.

The report below of last night's primary results in N.H. are a case in point. And what is interesting in all of this is not that reporters have lost touch with reality, but that we as a nation have. And one can only wonder why the major lead here isn't "America Admits to its Own Insanity."

What else is one to conclude when, in the same paragraph the reporter can conclude that

"...The two men are the types of candidates who traditionally succeed in European, not American, politics: the populist conservative and the socialist. Trump is essentially creating a political wing of his own, defined by his outlandish promises to singularly change American government with his leadership and business acumen and his ability to tap into the concerns many Americans have about illegal immigration, the threat of home-grown terrorism, the rising cost of healthcare and other threats to the middle class..."

Just because something might happen in Europe, or that it might have a title like "populist conservative," or even "Socialist," doesn't mean it is either possible, or the same thing. And one can have some confidence in this conclusion precisely because we are subsequently told that "...Trump is essentially creating a political wing of his own, defined by his outlandish promises to singularly change American government with his leadership and business acumen and his ability to tap into the concerns many Americans have..." If you understand that by "creating a political wing of his own" it is meant in the context of a specialized area of treatment for the "Reality Challenged."

The Bud Lite ad I posted on recently featured Amy Shumer and Seath Rogan creating their own wing of a political party, which I'm sure sold a lot of beer. Nobody would ever think, however, to suggest that, if the Europeans were forming a similar party, and having a good time with it, that it would then follow that this was real politics. Good advertising of course, but hardly real politics.

But therein lies an essential aspect of what defines our current form of "Electrified By Polar Disorder." We can sell ourselves on all sorts of fantasies and yet somehow set some aside as no more than that, but others as something else entirely. Desperately clung to in the hopes that a different outcome might come from them even though one hardly ever has in the seemingly endless go around of trying it again and again, and again.

Perhaps even more depressing, however, is the fact that, despite the fact of knowing at least at some level, this is mass delusion at work, we let it take up our attention to the exclusion of so many other, actually important, actually occurring, situations; the particulars of a grand reality of symptoms whose cause we simply do not want to take responsibility for. As I have said before, "the truth is out there." It's not a secret or an X-File. It is our shameful continuance with an organization model that has made us all at least partially crazy, and for which things are only getting worse.

New Hampshire Primary Could Fundamentally Change Both Political Parties