Unbuilding History

[Note: this post responds to Glenn Greenwald post deploring the use of propagandist Hollywood film scheduled to open in October of 2012.]

[Backqround: OCTOBER SURPRISE: The term came into use shortly after the 1972 presidential election between Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and Democrat George McGovern, when the United States was in the fourth year of negotiations to end the very long and domestically divisive Vietnam War. Twelve days before the election day of November 7, on October 26, 1972, the United States' chief negotiator, the presidential National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, appeared at a press conference held at the White House and announced, "We believe that peace is at hand".[1] Nixon, despite having vowed to end the unpopular war during his presidential election campaign four years earlier, had failed to either cease hostilities or gradually bring about an end to the war. Nixon was nevertheless already widely considered to be assured of an easy reelection victory against McGovern, but Kissinger's "peace is at hand" declaration may have increased Nixon's already high standing with the electorate. In the event, Nixon outpolled McGovern in every state except Massachusetts and achieved a 20 point lead in the nationwide popular vote. The fighting ended in 1973, but soldiers remained in Vietnam until 1975.)]

that’s clearly a coincidence because Democrats, unlike those Bush/Cheney monsters, do not exploit national security for political gain ... [gg]

Way, way back when, there was a very bad president who used his public office to ensure his re-election. He used dirty tricks, he spied on his opponents, he referred to people with ethnic and sexual slurs. He used every underhanded and despicable tactic he and his advisers could imagine.
He was a very bad man. He used his public office for private gain.

When he was caught being bad, he had to resign in disgrace. He carried the sins of his party -- his patrons and his retainers, his political allies and his beneficiaries -- almost alone. He was hounded out of office by both parties. He endured the disgrace with dignity and self-pity, assuming his party's sins as his own. This allowed his own party to remain viable.

(Meanwhile, shortly after this scandal and during the national turmoil that followed in its wake, a man who would dominate American politics as vice president, as president, and as father to a president assumed leadership of the CIA.)

By the by, another president was elected who, everyone of both parties admits, was too honest and too noble for the dirty job of President of the US.

He too was forced out of office when the opposition party used the very sort of dirty tricks against 'the too honest and too noble for the job' President to worm their way back into office and into the good graces of the American people.

They had learned their lesson:

During the Iran hostage crisis, the Republican challenger Ronald Reagan feared a last-minute deal to release the hostages, which might earn incumbent Jimmy Carter enough votes to win re-election in the 1980 presidential election.[2][3] As it happened, in the days prior to the election, press coverage was consumed with the Iranian government's decision—and Carter's simultaneous announcement—that the hostages would not be released until after the election.

Ratfuck your opponent before he ratfucks you. And don't get caught.

(Oh, by the way ... if you do get caught, use the office that you have to protect yourself:

Just four days before the vote that year, Ronald Reagan's defense secretary Caspar Weinberger was implicated[specify] in the Iran–Contra affair. Though he claims to have been opposed to the sale on principle, Weinberger participated in the transfer of United States TOW missiles to Iran, and was later indicted on several felony charges of lying to the Iran-Contra independent counsel during its investigation. Republicans angrily accused Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh of timing Weinberger's indictment to hurt George H. W. Bush's re-election chances, and on Christmas Eve 1992, in the waning days of his presidency, Bush pardoned Weinberger, just days before his trial was scheduled to begin.)

You can deplore the tactics and demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Obama administration, that's fine. But if you ignore -- rewrite -- history and pretend the two parties are exactly the same, you miss the point and contribute to the ineffectiveness of government that the Republicans have so slyly created and ruthlessly exploited since 1968. (see, for instance, Bush v. Gore, 2000)

The Democrats are playing according to rules Republicans established.

Finally.

Building Numbers

The earth is 4.5 billion years old.

A simple  number -- a span of time -- incomprehensible to humans as a reality, it may be conceived only as a symbol -- a wisp of human imagination. In our apprehension, this number carries the empty weight of a prefix like giga or tera, a technical meaning, of little import or meaning to everyday life.  Zeroes, meaning an impossible nothing, gather to mean an inconceivably more as they accumulate.

Forged by forces unknowable, solidified and silent for billions of years, this planet undistinguished from a billion other planets, also drifted lifelessly through an infinite lifelessness.

After a few hundred million years, prokaryotes (and others) decided to become.

Why they decided to become, I cannot say.  I think the universe demands it, but Newton -- and many others -- might scoff at such heresy.

Anyway, they became.  And became.  And became...

Here's an old riddle:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?  (Ans: The total number of grains equals 18,446,744,073,709,551,615)[source]

Assume, (an extreme improbability), one single prokaryote cell in the very beginning. The next day, that single cell becomes two, the day after, four ... and so on for 64 days.  Now continue this for a year ... ten years ... a million years ... two billion years!

How many prokaryotes then?  Who knows?  Who can count that many?  And who cares about unicellular creatures anyway?

I suppose you have to subtract the dead ones.  So okay, one inconceivably big number and another inconceivably big number -- but when the second number is less than the first, that is life!

When the second number is larger than the first, that is death.

When the second number is bigger than the first for a sustained period, then extinction ensues.

Around the 2.1 billionth year (give or take), something happened.

The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), also called the Oxygen Catastrophe or Oxygen Crisis or Great Oxidation, was the biologically induced appearance of free oxygen (O₂) in Earth's atmosphere. This major environmental change happened around 2.4 billion years ago...

First, it oxidized atmospheric methane (a strong greenhouse gas) to carbon dioxide (a weaker one) and water, triggering the Huronian glaciation. The latter may have been a full-blown, and possibly the longest ever, snowball Earth episode, lasting 300-400 million years.^[6][7] Second, the increased oxygen levels provided a new opportunity for biological diversification, as well as tremendous changes in the nature of chemical interactions between rocks, sand, clay, and other geological substrates and the Earth's air, oceans, and other surface waters. Despite natural recycling of organic matter, life had remained energetically limited until the widespread availability of oxygen. This breakthrough in metabolic evolution greatly increased the free energy supply to living organisms, having a truly global environmental impact; mitochondria evolved after the GOE. [source]

Imagine!  Lots of little critters get together, given sufficient food and sufficient time, change the chemistry of the entire planet!

Of course this sucks for those anaerobic critters who suffocated in inconceivably huge numbers.   (Good thing for them they were single-celled creatures.  They can stave off extinction because the smaller the creature, the more capably it evolves. Also they can retreat to the very fringes of a chemically diverse planet, even one becoming less diverse, inhabiting the small inhospitable spaces.) 

So what happens when the chemistry of the planet changes radically?

Mass extinction.

An extinction event (also known as: mass extinction; extinction-level event (ELE), or biotic crisis) is a sharp decrease in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. They occur when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Because the majority of diversity and biomass on Earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, recorded extinction events affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere rather than the total diversity and abundance of life. [source]

 This is how to build death, countless species at once.

Is the biosphere today on the verge of anything like the mass extinctions of the geological past? Could some equivalent of meteorite impacts or dramatic climate change be underway, as humankind's rapid destruction of natural habitats forces animals and plants out of existence?

Increasingly, researchers are doing the numbers, and saying, yes, if present trends continue, a mass extinction is very likely underway. The evidence is pieced together from details drawn from all over the world, but it adds up to a disturbing picture. This time, unlike the past, it's not a chance asteroid collision, nor a chain of climatic circumstances alone that's at fault. Instead, it is chiefly the activities of an ever-growing human population, in concert with long-term environmental change.[source]

This is what happens when a single species succeeds so dramatically.  It builds its own death ... along with death of billions of other multicellular species that cannot adapt to such extreme environmental changes.

But who -- in reality -- counts such inconceivably large numbers of lost individuals and extinct species, especially when there are trillions upon trillions of dollars, euros, yuans, pesos, rupees, etc to be shoveled into a bank account?

Building Meaning

This bin Laden show — “Inside the Situation Room” — was hagiography in its purest, most propagandistic, and most subservient form. This is typically the role Williams plays — he cleanses and glorifies American government actions, especially military actions, with his reverent, soothing, self-important baritone — but he really outdid himself here.

From the start, Williams proudly displayed his child-like excitement over his special access: “television cameras are inside the Situation Room for the very first time,” he gushed.”[Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' televised tour of the WHSR]

Absolutely accurate, yet it's not so personal.

It's business.

As usual.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. ... The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.[source]

Every profitable profit-driven institution is integrated; poor performance in one sector degrades the performance of the entity itself. 

People want comfortable cohesion rather than inchoate impressions and disturbing -- that is, dissonant -- imagery. (eg, repetitive images of 911 and no images of coffins from Iraq or charred bodies after drone strikes.)

As human creatures, our minds actively make sense of the world -- that is, we fill in the more nebulous details to match the gestalt presented.  Discordant details get discarded and/or changed while harmonious details gain significance because we empathize with the subjects of our perceptions.  We remember the image of the person falling/jumping from the WTC because it makes iconic the horror rather than recalling a white van somewhere off site which demands analysis rather than visceral response -- which is to say, we subvert our own conscious processes when we choose visceral concordance.

In the natural world, we're pretty accurate at drawing conclusions. In a mediated world (one seen through your television or newspaper), we're pretty bad at an accurate understanding of events because we rely upon others' presentation rather than our own impressions. We have our impressions of others' presentations rather than our own impression.  It's rather like seeing an image of food and feeling hungry yet being entirely unable to satisfy our hunger with the food presented to us (intentionally presented in the most evocative way.)

Advertisers (or, for the politically minded, "propagandists") don't put a for sale sign on a product and leave the sale to the buyers' discretion; they sell the entire experience:  This is their job and they're experts at it.

The continuous pressure is to create ads more and more in the image of audience motives and desires. The product matters less as the audience participation increases. ...  The steady trend in advertising is to manifest the product as an integral part of large social purposes and processes. [Marshall McLuhan 1962]

NBC isn't selling patriotism so much as it's selling Brian Williams -- the persona, the celebrity, the everyman who happens to be an insider.  Thus:

For his first inquiry, Williams, holding his spectacles in his hand,... [gg, above]

Human details -- idiosyncrasies like his clutched reading glasses -- are intentionally part of the scenery.   At any point, Williams could have handed them off to an assistant, but he keeps them -- consciously or unconsciously -- to establish a connection with the viewer.  WE, (not me, well-coiffed, well-attired, well-spoken, well-powdered Brian Williams but all of us, viewer and special representative and advertiser) share this adventure.  We vicariously experience this archeological excursion into the shadowy pyramid of power we call the White House Situation Room.  Here is where, when it comes, nuclear apocalypse begins and the human species ends.

Shhhh ... whisper in sacred awe, because truly, it is naked power which WE observe ... which WE dare not disturb lest it turns it gaze on us.

Brought to you by NBC(Comcast/GE) and the DNC, partners in a better world for all of US*.



*Disclaimer, if you think you're one of US, you're not. That's why we go to such expense creating these illusions.  It would be simpler just to kill the lot of you parasites and be done with it.  Every now and then you amuse us.  Plus, who would shine our shoes?