Fantasy has always had a prominent role in America.
It has been a driving force since its earliest beginnings.
It was useful in sanitizing the genocide of the native population with all the chest-thumping heroic myths surrounding the brave pioneers in their covered wagons.
Lies about the “Savages” eased a national conscience & made slaughter and thievery normal & “the right thing to do”.
Later money would be made lauding the white heroes who confronted all evil with an admirable swagger. Time after time they beat the bad guys with their black hats, saving the good people of the town. The sheer repetitive mantra of the good guys always winning out against evil sank deep into the American soul.
On top of this was the saintliness of their slave-owning founding fathers and the deeply comforting notion that Americans were God’s chosen people with the perfect set of political and corporate systems that the people of the rest of the world will copy if only the “bad guys” will let them.
Americans swallowed the myth of their own perfection hook, line and sinker. They would bring freedom, democracy and all their glories to the world by defeating evil as their cowboy heroes had done time after time.
We see these mythologies acted out in almost every statement of geopolitical content made by every president, secretary of state and prominent U.S. politician and most obviously in every regime change war waged.
The fantasies conjured up by Hollywood act to strengthen the general
unreality within American minds generating a milieu where identifying
truth from fiction becomes almost impossible where minds are saturated
with a myriad number of self-serving, self-lauding inputs.
On top of the proclivity to believe simplistic answers of a thousand kinds we have the constant mind invasion of American mainstream media and its most pernicious broadcaster of misinformation, its “news” services.
The depth of news coverage is hard to describe due to its paucity. An event or statement of some kind generates the chattering of countless talking heads who spread a thick jam of opinion on top of it. If it concerns the “bad guys” over there you can be sure the usual memes are emphasized with no contrary facts, no attempt to dig deeper than the usual accusations and essentially the same message to all Americans: “You are good, we are good, our political, corporate and military elites are good. Always were, always will be... and the “bad guys” over there are as evil as sin.”
Americans exist in this maelstrom of fantasy and fakery from cradle to grave.
In past years in America there were some actual journalists doing actual journalism who performed the equivalent service of the little boy who pointed out the emperor was wearing no clothes by trying to expose the fact that America did wrong sometimes.
This group was whittled down to almost non-existence particularly after 9/11. Anyone speaking against the United States or even inferring that it was capable of bad deeds was an immediate target for attack and seen as a likely traitor or at the very least exhibiting terribly bad taste. Such people would be ostracized, made into pariahs, demoted, denigrated and sacked.
Now the entire panoply of mass media in America is a lie-repeating organism in complete self-censorship mode endlessly channeling the current state narrative regarding the “bad guys” over there who are seeking to destroy America’s perfect system and the perfect people within it.
Those “bad guys” have no redeeming qualities. The very idea that they might have is an unmentionable topic. Nothing must get in the way of manufacturing the appropriate amount of consent that lets perfect America make its perfect decisions and intervene in its perfect way across the planet.
These days an organization which in previous times was found to be spreading lies across the nation through infiltration and exploitation of journalists and film makers, the CIA, is regarded as the oracle of ultimate truth. The media and political elites receive their anonymous findings and speculations as Holy Writ, bowing in supplication and grateful thanks for its assistance in reinforcing the self-serving myths about all the “bad guys” out there. The CIA's notorious 'Operation Mockingbird' is relegated to myth status if not totally forgotten.
The CIA is of course without any exaggeration the most dishonest agency on the planet.
So the interlocking web of deceit is complete, each integral element
complements the others in a swirling mutually-reinforcing and
all-permeating sea of incessant fake news and other believable fakery.
Tiny voices at the edge of this sea whisper the results of their efforts to uncover the actual facts on each issue. They are either ignored completely or seen as outliers, self-hating useful idiots or outright traitors, Assad apologists, Putin's Puppets or just possibly Chinese spies. Nothing is to get in the way or contradict the necessary narratives and believable lies. What if people began to believe them? What would happen to our Lone Ranger-style certainty of our own goodness? We would begin to doubt ourselves and that wouldn’t be good, would it? How would we save the world then? If we were ALSO bad guys to any degree?
So, the lies MUST be the truth. The fantasies are reality. War is Peace and continued ignorance is wisdom.
And so it is that this vast sea of lies becomes an individual soup of propaganda for all Americans just like their swimming pool in the back yard. They swim in this soup all day long and through the night, a 24/7 reassurance that all’s well.
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