Eight Feet Deep

It is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult for me to believe. It is even harder for me to stom­ach. But it seems the Repub­li­cans have won or are win­ning the pro­pa­ganda war in their fight against health care reform. What really upsets me is that the national media, not all, but specif­i­cally the cable news net­works, have helped deliver the pub­lic opin­ion against the Obama administration’s attempts.

The cable news man­agers and other media jump­ing like trained dogs when­ever a dis­rup­tive town hall is near will repeat that old jour­nal­is­tic saw: “If we piss off the right and the left, we must be doing some­thing right.”

Well in this par­tic­u­lar instance, you aren’t really piss­ing off the right.

The “Wash­ing­ton Post’s” E.J. Dionne, a lib­eral lean­ing colum­nist, reports a par­tic­u­larly telling encounter with a net­work TV stringer at a recent town hall. The free­lancer tells Dionne quite frankly that if the meet­ing doesn’t “blow up,” then their piece doesn’t see the air.

So, if the Repub­li­can minor­ity defeats health care reform or forces a “reform lite,” then the party can sit back and cel­e­brate. Per­haps the GOP can then go for­ward with a bit more con­fi­dence and calmly plan a takeover of Con­gress dur­ing the midterms. Right?

Oh they will go for­ward. But calm doesn’t seem like the strategy.

One goes with what works. The scream­ing and anger and inco­her­ence which makes peo­ple hate the thought of gov­ern­ment health care while lov­ing their Medicare, all of which has been accom­plished through mil­lions in Repub­li­can money and clever brain­wash­ing will not stop.

And as long as the media — cable news espe­cially — have what they believe to be a sim­ple crowd pleaser such as scream­ing, angry, inco­her­ent and often igno­rant cit­i­zens riled up against a cause, that too will con­tinue. Remem­ber car chases cov­ered by helicopters?

Where will it all end or will it end? Maybe it won’t. Per­haps it is just begin­ning or has been under way for some time. Think back to the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion and some of the tech­niques used today by those pulling strings behind the health care oppo­si­tion.
One may see cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics which were sim­i­lar in style to those of a infa­mous auto­cratic leader. That leader’s psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file by an early U.S. intel­li­gence agency reported:

“His pri­mary rules were: never allow the pub­lic to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never con­cede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alter­na­tives; never accept blame; con­cen­trate on one enemy at a time and blame him for every­thing that goes wrong; peo­ple will believe a big lie sooner than a lit­tle one; and if you repeat it fre­quently enough peo­ple will sooner or later believe it.”

The leader, of course, was Adolf Hitler. Yes, say the right-wingers, it always comes down to Hitler. Well, yes, or Joseph Goebbels. Remem­ber the book burn­ing, or Kristall­nacht? Such incred­i­ble media manip­u­la­tion by very infe­rior lit­tle men.

What one sees in all the scream­ing and hate, besides the igno­rance and the fail­ure of some the Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem, is peo­ple with gigan­tic chips on their shoul­ders. Some may have mate­r­ial wealth. Some may even claim spir­i­tual wealth.  But some­where in that same Amer­i­can sys­tem that many of us so cher­ish, that is so cher­ish­able, is left a gap.

It is a gap where humil­ity is miss­ing as is under­stand­ing. Sure, we help our neigh­bor when their house burns down. But if that neigh­bor looks a lit­tle dif­fer­erent or has a lit­tle dif­fer­ent lifestyle, well, sorry we have things to do this week­end. We can’t rebuild your house.

Wealth has made our nation great. But pros­per­ity has also poi­soned some with greed.

In the end, what do we have? We have igno­rance, anger, a lack of humil­ity and greed. We don’t want to pay taxes. We want a strong mil­i­tary that will nuke every lit­tle tin­horn coun­try at the drop of a hat. We don’t want to pay taxes. We have com­pas­sion, unless it is for some­one whom we think based on a whim doesn’t deserve it. We don’t want to pay taxes. We hate gov­ern­ment, espe­cially the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. But we want our mil­i­tary march­ing down the street look­ing sharp, shoot­ing at any ille­gal com­ing across the bor­der. We hate the gov­ern­ment. We like our mil­i­tary pen­sions and VA pen­sions and ben­e­fits. We don’t want to pay taxes.

So per­haps I have strayed from my orig­i­nal the­sis that the Repub­li­cans have devel­oped a well-oiled pro­pa­ganda machine that in some respects reflect those from Ger­many in the 1940s.

More impor­tant is to rec­og­nize that some of our quirks and char­ac­ter­is­tics are ripe for car­ry­ing that pro­pa­ganda machine way beyond defeat­ing “Obama Care.”

If that hap­pens, can any­one say: Goebbels?