The Problem With Fake News

-
Do you know what your problem is, Zhòngní?



Besides the gentleman's distaste for Aldebaran whiskey, that is.




Once in a while a random visitor, who is apparently having a tough day of one sort or another, stops by and just drops a disparaging comment about the quality of the drinks or the performance of the staff and whatnot, and just walks away without another word. It happens. And, mostly, the people here don’t mind. "Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc!" and all that sort of thing. It comes with the territory and is all part of the spirit of the place.

I am not judging, I just wish the gentleman could have stayed and hanged around a bit, and shared with the people at the bar what had been eating at him—a wise man of the gentleman’s renown.

I am sorry that my idle prattling—and poking fun at the DNC, was it?—offended the gentleman so.

Does the gentleman know what the problem with Fake News is?

State sponsored propaganda is the main purveyor of Fake News.

It is so now. And it has always been so.

But I am sure that surely such an obvious truism is no news to a wise man of the gentleman’s renown, whom History remembers for his concern over personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity.

Me? I have never been much of a team player when it comes to partisan political propaganda.

This is probably the reason why I became one of the bartenders here at the Wulfshead: to get away from it all.



Looking back at the world, one may wonder how it came to be. I mean, for things to devolve into where they are at, now. Not just the sad state of affairs with the kind of unrestrained militarism that passes for American foreign policy under the current POTUS, or his last two predecessors, or amongst the current breed of Neocon-Democrats, but the zeitgeist of an entire nation as a whole.

The USA.

The road not taken.

There are those who say we are not where we are supposed to be, that, somehow, using a familiar metaphor, the Matrix was reset in 2000, or on 911, or in 2016, or, that, if you will, using another familiar metaphor (STNG: Yesterday's Enterprise), ours is a ship of peace, not a ship of war.



But, as I am sure the gentleman knows, this too is State Propaganda—as it is also, at the same time and on the brighter side of the coin, the ingenuous wishful thinking of those who yearn for a better world and who hope in their heart that America is everything it proclaims it is:

"The shining city on the hill."

But America has not changed.

America did not change in 2000.

It did not change on September 11, 2001.

And while it put on a good show at pretending it did at the time, America did not change in 2008, either.

It did not change in 2016.

And it is doubtful whether America will change in 2020, either.

America is staying the course. A course it has been on for a long, long time.

You know how it is:







It remains the case today.

One visitor, someone other than you, asked whatever happened to the peace movement—or, in more recent date, the #Resistance, for that matter.

There was that essay by James F. Moore that tried to capture the 2003 anti-war protest, which went viral: The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head

It took place on February 15, 2003 (way before Obama’s Hope We Can Believe campaign in America), a coordinated day of protests started across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressed opposition to the imminent Iraq War. Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as "the largest protest event in human history." Not so much so in the USA, though. As a point of comparison the 2017 "pussy-hat" march in New York City rallied a greater number of protesters than the Iraq anti-war protest managed to gather in that same city in 2003.

The peace movement is not what it used to be.

And the #Resistance is most certainly not it.

It looks like it is easier (and more safe) nowadays, not to mention, more politically opportunistic to the #Resistance, to mobilize protesters over what was, at the time, some 12 year old recording of Donald Trump talking about women in vulgar terms to the host of Access Hollywood, than it is to make a stance of any kind over disastrous unethical murderous geopolitical military and economic foreign policies—or looming global environmental catastrophe.

In their defense, nothing much of any real significance seems to be happening anywhere else in the world either.