Watch out for propaganda it will make you stupid

The following was an email sent to me and I just could not pass it up. Please read all bold inserts, just to set the record straight. There is way too much history twisting and propaganda going around. You nor I need to fall in the trap of revisionism and provincial thinking. Have a great Liberal (individual rights, freedom from oppression and fear) thinking day.

Failure of an Idea --  And a People

 In his 1935 State of the Union Address, FDR spoke to a  nation mired in the Depression, but still marinated in conservative  values: "Continued  dependence" upon welfare (does this include corporate welfare, in fact corporate welfare, i.e. the new energy bill-please see tax payers for common sense-outweighs individual welfare 1000 to 1. Even if every black, white, brown, green, yellow or purple person was given full and unadulterated welfare to would be a drop in the preverbal bucket compared to the tax breaks, give-a-ways and personal gifts made to the political donor class. But please do not take my word as truth-as you have with this writer- please indulge yourself with a copiously sited book: Is that a Politician in your Pocket? Amazon will have it for you and it will be less than a corporate cup of coffee.) said FDR, "induces a spiritual disintegration  fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.( and corporate welfare has done just that) To dole out relief in this  way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."(and domestic jobs)

 

Behind FDR's statement was the conviction that, while the  government must step in in an emergency; in normal times, men provide the  food, clothing and shelter for their  families (yes in a Sir Thomas More world of complete equals this maxim is true but for those American citizens who are left for dead: convention center, superdome, the 9^th ward, my friends on St. Charles: there are no normal times. But of coarse if you do not have full and complete knowledge of this situation, i.e. you are not them, you can sit back and wave your post-modern baton and ask "why can't they just leave, why can't they just get a job, why can't they just be more like me." The arrogance and antipathic tone of his intellectual(?) questions begins to show the true disconnect between the haves and the have nots. And if you think that this is not a true representation of the majority of Americans in this nation, then you are most likely a have.)

 

And we did, until the war pulled us out of the  Depression and a postwar boom made us, in John K. Galbraith's phrase, The  Affluent Society (also the title of a clear and concise economic book revealing the need for government regulation and stop gap measures within a free market economy- thank god it wasn't Milton Friedman's theory of free markets or we would be buying bottled Perrier Air.)  By the 1960s,

America, the richest country on earth, was growing ever more  prosperous. But with the 1964 landslide of LBJ, liberalism (First Liberalism began with Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton- The Federalist Papers are a great place to start i.e. the birth of the democrats and the first and most fatal defeat of republicans read CATO or federal farmer in the Anti-Federalist papers and you can hear Pat Buchanan singing) triumphed and  began its great experiment. Behind the Great Society was a great idea: to lift  America's poor out of poverty, government should now take  care of all their basic needs. By giving the poor welfare, subsidized food,  public housing and free medical care, government will end poverty in  America.

 

At the Superdome and New Orleans Convention  Center, we saw the failure of 40 years of the Great  Society.(a blind man could see more than a failure of a federal program which was handed to the local authorities then under funded and marginalized upon its conception. Moreover, the throngs of poor revealed that life in America is not as it seems. Our voyeuristic lives of sound bits and TV logic has deluded our awareness of the massive poverty, working poor, and uninsured in America.)  

No sooner had Katrina passed by and the 17thStreet levee broke than  hundreds of young men who should have taken charge in helping the aged, the  sick and the women with babies to safety took to the

streets to shoot, loot  and rape.(was this observation taken first hand, in other words this author was there in the thick of it with man's nature awoken or was he in front of Fox news with a coke and a smile? Upon further review the tales of looting were overblown and the cases of rape are still murky at best, not bad for people left for dead ) The New  Orleans police, their numbers cut by deserters who left their  posts to look after their families(of coarse none of the NO police were looting), engaged in running gun battles all day  long to stay alive and protect  people.

It was the character and conduct of its people that  makes the New  Orleans disaster unique. (Wow, judge not! Are you sure this wasn't written by Bush? What hubris and steadfast ignorance of a situation. And I assume that this author has been without water, food, shelter and protection for days and has drawn from his personal experience to lay such a catastrophic judgment.)  After a hurricane, people's needs are  simple: food, water, shelter, medical attention. But they can be hard to  meet... People buried in rubble or hiding in attics of flooded homes are tough  to get to. But, even with the incompetence of the mayor and governor, and the  torpor of federal officials, this was  possible. Coast Guard helicopters were operating Tuesday.  There were roads open into the city for SUVs, buses and trucks. While New  Orleans was flooded, the water was stagnant. People walked  through to the convention center and Superdome. The flimsiest boat could  navigate.

Even if government dithered for days -- what else is new  -- this does not explain the failure of the people  themselves.( Where the hell is this guy getting his information, or his he just winging it.) Between 1865 and 1940, the South -- having lost a fourth  of its best and bravest in battle, devastated by war, mired in poverty -- was  famous for the hardy self-reliance of her people, black and  white. (Besides the lynching, robber barons and monopolies which decreased competition and restored the status quo before the war, hay but who reads the whole history book any more)

 

In 1940, hundreds of British fishermen and yachtsmen sailed back and forth daily under fire across a turbulent 23-mile  Channel to rescue 300,000 soldiers from Dunkirk. How do we explain to the world that a tenth that number of Americans could not be reached in four days from across a stagnant  pond? The real disaster of Katrina was that society broke down.(define society? The government, the people, the local merchants, the schools etc.? Or is this a philosophical discussion about how a society and the social contract which binds the people to the government is perversely broken in their time of need)  An entire community could not cope. Liberalism, the idea that good intentions  and government programs can build a Great Society, was exposed as fraud.(Does he mean liberal democracies like The US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Costa Rica and on and on… liberal is a great word, for if it did not exist or was not practiced then this ignorant schlep could not pontificate his delusional propaganda) After  trillions of tax dollars for welfare (and trillions more for corporations), food stamps, public housing, job  training and education have poured out since 1965, poverty remains pandemic.  But today, when the police vanish, the community disappears and men take to  the streets to prey on women and the  weak.

Stranded for days in a pool of fetid water, almost  everyone waited for the government to come save them. They screamed into the  cameras for help, and the reporters screamed into the cameras for help, and  the "civil rights leaders" screamed into the cameras that Bush was responsible  and Bush was a  racist. Americans were once famous for taking the initiative, for  having young leaders rise up to take command in a crisis. See any of that at  the Superdome? Sri Lankans and Indonesians, far poorer than we, did not behave  like this in a tsunami that took 400 times as many lives as Katrina has thus  far.

We are the descendants of men and women who braved  the North  Atlantic  in wooden boats to build a country in a strange land.( at least he went to primary school) Our ancestors traveled thousands of miles in covered wagons, fighting off Indians far braver than  those cowards preying on New  Orleans'  poor.

 Watching that performance in the Crescent City, it seems clear: We are not the people our parents were.  And what are all our Lords Temporal now howling for? Though government failed  at every level, they want more  government. FDR  was right. A "spiritual disintegration" has overtaken us. Government-as-first  provider, the big idea of the Great Society, has proven to be "a narcotic, a  subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Either we  get off this narcotic, or it kills  us. (this passage is riddled with syllogisms and revisionist history, remember the best propaganda is the one you realize is false but find some semblance of truth, thus the seed of deception and falsehood is planted.)

 

Have a great day and turn off the TV