“Everything the State [and the moneyed class that owns it] says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”

At present, according to recent polling, 52 percent of the US citizenry approve of Donald Trump’s performance in office, this is, even as Trump pulls from his bloated ass Joseph Goebbels’ grade lies e.g., Diversity hires are responsible for the recent aviation tragedy over the Potomac River. Hyperbole? The insidious declaration is right out of the Nazi era playbook. For example, the Nazi “stabbed in the back by international and internal parasitic Jews” lie, promulgated by the Nazi propaganda machine, was deployed to blame shift the cause of Germany’s defeat and the attendant economic miseries in the wake of World War I.

In my lifetime, the following varieties of shame-rancid fabulation arrived during waves of rightwing inflicted political/cultural regression. In my native city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the Civil Rights era, segregationist demagoguery went thus: The end of Jim Crow would embolden sexually feral Black men to endanger fragile flowers of southern womanhood; during the Vietnam era, pro war propaganda warned, the Vietnamese are bereft of respect for human life and will be headed westward to endanger all of freedom-loving Christendom by means of falling dominoes if the war ends before the surrender of the North Vietnamese communists; during the Reagan era, gold tooth-adored, Cadillac-driving Welfare Queens, purchasing steak, lobster, and cases of malt liquor at supermarkets, are destroying the nation’s economy; and, over the last two hideous years, Zionist propaganda warned, murderous-by-nature Palestinians must forever live with an IDF boot on their collective neck or a second Holocaust would be imminent.

“The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful…”

― Henri Bergson

Moreover, on an historical basis, myths told by conquering Athenians wove tales of a sexually insatiable, Cretin witch queen who had carnal relations with a monstrous bull risen from the Mediterranean Sea, and as a consequence birthed a labyrinth-dwelling half bull/half man beast possessing an appetite for virgin youth. Across the Mediterranean, in the Levant, a tale went as follows, promised by their sky-father God, Israelites crossed the Jordan river, and, in a preview of horrors to come, annihilated the people of Canaan and claimed the land as their own.

Returning to the present toxic mythos of the present era, if I attempt to confront Trump’s true believers on the outright lies he and his clutch of sub-reality television grade grifters retail in, I suspect, my attempts at persuasion would carry the dismal degree of efficacy as when I attempt to reach my eleven year son old on his compulsion to be sucked into the storylines of Grand Theft Auto and attendant, dopamine-jacking narratives unfolding in the video game are an accurate depiction of how criminal activity plays out in the non-pixel world. I cannot compete against thrills freighted in the phenomenon known as the suspension of disbelief.

What are the cultural/political circumstances that allow prevarication to be perpetrated sans impunity? Will our destinies, both individual and collective, continue to be determined by pervasive deceit — by pernicious storylines, concocted by cadres of elitist fabulists, and perpetuated with the agenda of frightening and bamboozling a perpetually credulous citizenry?

Sadly, as noted above, there is not a granule of novelty in the great dismal of it all; nations, tribes, and families spin tales composed of sacred lies. Most of us are compelled to find rationales to live with ourselves and to tolerate the presence of those close to........

© CounterPunch