WHAT MIGHT MAKE THE UNITED STATES TRULY GREAT?

WHAT MIGHT MAKE THE UNITED STATES TRULY GREAT?

The  one-sentence answer: If it truly lived up to its professed ideals!

The elaborated answer:
1] If it admitted to the crimes of slavery and extermination of the Native people and made amends & effected the necessary redress.

I] If it admitted to the perversion of its Monroe doctrine and apologized – the very  least it could do - to all Caribbean, Central & South American countries for the invasions, overthrowing  of their governments, and to Mexico for stealing a third of its land in the 19the century, and made the requisite amends.

3)If it pleaded guilty to the crimes of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh, of the 1953 invasion of Guatemala, the attempt to replace the French as overlords of Indochina that led to the invasion of Vietnam; to the criminal destabilization of Afghanistan – and if it did so it would be in defiance of George Herbert Bush’s claim that the United States never apologizes, in his case refusing to do so for shooting down an Iranian passenger plane and killing 250 human beings. And if Uncle Sam also apologized for the madness of his anti-communism he would cease to be known as a mean, small-minded paranoid sadist & instead would set an   example, an example that would shine as bright as the sun.

ON FAKE NEWS

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-fake-news-fallacy?

THE “FAKE NEWS” CONUNDRUM

It ought not to come as a surprise that a demagogue shouting “fake news“ obtains considerable automatic agreement from his followers, and does so in a world that is overwhelmed with information and where most everything yet is actually knowable and verifiable if you have the time, the time, the time, the patience the patience and the knowledge and capacity to verify.

The matter of the current Trumpian edition of Fake NewS is scarcely merely a matter of normal human, or if you like, mammalian dread as  which it can be accounted in the instance of Welles’ WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1938.

„Fake“ & „News“, two words not found co-joined until recently,  yet  in a short time the phrase  has come to sound as though it had been around for years, loud and clear…. to obscure, to defeat, at least to throw into doubt even the most obvious and rationally ascertainable truths such as the contribution of human activity to the heating of the planet & its exponential consequences.

“We” all know a fake when we see it!  Except for the one’s we miss, or the ones we get used to living with, or where we think what the hell what does it matter.

Then there are the true believers, say, the Seventh Day Adventist, but how do you prove to them that there are barking up the wrong tree? How can news even be fake? News is news, is new or old hat, but then it ought not to be called news, should it, except by sleepyheads.

 “Fake” is a word that you learn while you are still young.  “That’s a fake,” the kid is told about a wooden nickel! (I have never seen one!) The first fake experience a kid will have is of a false nipple, an appeaser for the longing for the real thing.  “Real” & “fake” will be concepts coupled as diametrically opposed in the kid’s mind.

A “falsie” in adolescence does not refer to a wooden nickel but to whatever it takes – tissue paper, padding of any kind - to make believe it is a mature breast, an enhancement to make a young girl appear more mature and attractive and to enhance her sense of womanliness in the making., which will disappoint the callow boyfriend’s hand. –

The concept “false”/ falta seeps into one’s American being at an early age, never to be disabused, but to be augmented by an increasing number of experiences of buying, being subjected, being fooled by matters that are not what they seem. The breast that the mature lover caressed is of silicone! – No wonder that my caresses fail to elicit the anticipated response, no wonder that the news so often elicits the response “same same.”

On the basis of the above observation you could conclude that the truthfulness of the news that all kinds of media convey is susceptible to serious doubt; the only news you therefore end up trusting are your bodily sensations, what you see and feel and hear; everything mediated is susceptible to doubt.  Whose word do you trust? Family, friends & then there are those who take the Bible literally.

To above cited reasons to distrust the news are then added instances when the government, not just a corporation, has lied to you, to the public. Propaganda.  Propaganda in an Orwellian world.  And has lied for generations. And in the most important matters of war and peace.

In addition, keep in mind the human propensity to deny unpleasant news, for denial, for wishful thinking, for fantasy, for misunderstanding.

Thus, shocking as it continues to be, it is not all that surprising that a demagogue might succeed in devaluing truthful news by screaming “fake” at everything that is critical of him and that disagrees with his views, and have his followers act as his chorus; although, I must say, it continues to surprise that such a major onslaught, even on the most obvious of truths, should find such a wide responsiveaudience. Dommage. And yet another factor comes into play: How much available time exists for the average working stiff to obtain, dwell on and possibly check the truthfulness of the news, local, national, international? Should there be doubt as to a story’s truthfulness how long will it take, on average, to verify – not all that much, say, of a local warehouse fire, although there may be residual doubt as to the fire’s source.  A national story will take hours to track.  Imagine being eighteen years old: how long will it take to have a fair idea of the whys and wherefores of the sixteen-year old Afghanistan war, whose origin dates to Carter/Brzezinski’s destabilization to draw in the stupid Russian bear, the Soviets; that is, to the Cold War. Dwell on the long, propaganda-filled stretches that you need to traverse in this Orwellian world to reach something approximating truth!  Think about the news sources! For example, here in Seattle we have but a single newspaper, it aggregates its out of town news, mostly from AP, Blomberg, McClatchey & the New York Times; two weekly local news sheets of the Village Voice type;  a few T.V. stations whose news output scarcely differs; some variants in cable and radio news and commentary;  a locust plague of info-bits on social media if you choose to expose yourself to it;  a number  of  political and civil interest blogs.