"The Moment of Truth" ~ Fetishising Honesty in an Age of Deceit
This week for my six hours I've been reading Fair Game, learning more and more about the administration's criminal activity surrounding the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Wilson's identity. Thoughts of Wilson's memoir provided the background for my encounter with Dan Abram's broadcast last night. Abrams updated us on the former Alabama governor who is languishing in prison, possibly as another Karl Rove political payback. (It was Rove who told Chris Matthews that Wilson was "fair game" after her Ambassador husband Joe Wilson spoke out about the administration's fast and loose "interpretation" of intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.)
On the same broadcast, we learned about an episode on the game show "The Moment of Truth", where people compete to win money by answering intimate questions while hooked up to a polygraph machine. One woman revealed that she had cheated on her husband and wanted to be married to another man. The couple has since separated. The show is pulling high ratings.
So, why have the fates given us this public spectacle in which people are paid to commit painful honesty that ruins their lives right around the time that a newly created database allows us to search and examine the administration's Iraq-related lies? Lies that have destroyed millions of lives? High crimes that have had few real life repercussions for the perpetrators?
Neither Congress nor the American people insist on truth and justice from our highest officials. As the public assents to illegal spying and official lying, we want to watch everyday individuals squirm in the messy, explosive orgies of honesty-fueled cringe.
Sadness and disgust don't even begin to describe how it feels to lose faith in public desire to maintain legitimate accountability and, thus, genuine democracy. We seem to only want truth in its most sadistic forms.
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It has indeed been a horrifyingly rapid descent and it shows absolutely no signs of slowing. Every candidate save one in this campaign season seems to blithely accept our loss of freedoms and indeed intend to continue them. Speaking the truth is INDEED a radical act in this land of liars, and the one candidate who speaks the truth to our plight in this country and calls for a rolling back of our increasingly fascist state is thoroughly silenced by the media, even though he enjoys unprecedented grass roots support. I invite you to check out my web site dedicated to this remarkable man's campaign: www.paulforronpaul.com
I was kinda thinkin' the same thing when I saw the promos for that "game" show. Actually, I had a daydream the we put Shrub, Shooter, Scooter, Turdblossom and Novak on that show, with the House and Senate in the audience. Then I was shaken out of my reverie by the thought that ALL my web surfing was being evaluated by some NSA analyst.
I know you have attempted to answer this before, but, What the hell will it take to wake people up?
A winning daydream!
Sometimes I think people are waking up. I feel a lot better about where we're headed than I did before the primaries. At least there is a rhetorical commitment to change.
But the more I find out about what really happened in the Plame case, the more disillusioned I become. It took a lot for me to understand the extent of the lawlessness and the implications it has for the lives of everyday people. I don't think people get it, and I don't think they will until their autonomy is in some way infringed upon in a way that doesn't make them feel "safer." Most folks are frogs in Mark Twain's gradually heating pot. Sometimes the only solution is to jump out.