"§ñühw¤£f" wrote in message
et...

Hard to replace her though. She's funny.

I agree. Definitely hilarious.

Some of the best Palin-related stuf is on the bartcop.com website.

Any faves?

That corporate poster is pretty funny...


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COaoYqkpkUA
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when you said "corporate" you reminded me of an article a friend sent me
recently...


The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free

Jun 29, 2009
By Chris Hedges

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit
and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious
idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the
freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others
has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been
exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the
travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out
and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class
warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to
enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a
vengeance.

Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of
Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of
Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this
crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those
who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to
mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled
democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of
communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of
social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian
right.

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was
systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These
corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the
human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values
of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic
expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a
press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their
communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New
desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the
old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate
culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural
homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk
culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the
ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the
idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the
destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American
culture.

How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was
destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer
culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the
cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?

All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that
brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It
was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic.
We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when
societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces,
which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to
snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt
liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our
permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma
or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap
dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications
and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and
search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of
totalitarian capitalism.

Stuart Ewen, whose books “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the
Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” and “PR: A Social History of Spin”
chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed
populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting
chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the
ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that
it falsely evokes the scales of justice.

He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”

“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,”
he said when I spoke to him by phone. “In certain ways it mirrors the
two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak
you need to have a Republican speak.

It offers the phantom of objectivity. It creates the notion that the
universe of discourse is limited to two positions. Issues become black or
white. They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.”

Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid
human rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact.

Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses
facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of
rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they
naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people
toward justice, they are largely helpless.

“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts,
but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said. “When
Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a
point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come
to attention, he is right.”

The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on
the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War
I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” a manual for
the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the
key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to
manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached
from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an
“intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”

These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for
Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to
skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public.
The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of
most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and
balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained
under corporate and governmental control.

Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and
18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind
is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is
good and emotion which is bad.”

He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a
search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and
rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to
disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal
to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human
beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason,
and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward.
This is not true.”

The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse
propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and
labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and
advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the
public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make
little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a
time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to
emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is
evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with
a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform
photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums
awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the
turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did
the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton
Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the
abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion
and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate
propaganda.

We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able
to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its
flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it
uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints
the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called
EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television
ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit—an
actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of “WorldBeat” on
CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen studio that
becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before each image,
that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but
health care and jobs.

“It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the
stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil and
natural gas will bring about,” Ewen said. “If you go to the Web site there
is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad closes
you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API, the
American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the
other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad
to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.”

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the
irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will
be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in
corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of
information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to
write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and
honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism.
The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be
erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an
understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are
there.

“As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways
that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and
concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said. “You can’t
do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the
present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda
are antediluvian.”

Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the
attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered
capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that
power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory,
which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to
this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer
funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is
being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.

“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the
issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or
housing and homelessness,” Ewen said. “We have to think about presenting
these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two
steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task. It
is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is,
especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the
1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the
country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It
developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of
the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many
structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The
Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation
of mainstream media.”

“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said. “All I can do is look at historical
precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not about
looking backwards. If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future. If
you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past you can’t
understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the
present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell
said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.”

“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’
autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s
‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that
communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower
people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated
understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to
learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are
going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We
need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric—not lying,
but rhetoric in its more conventional sense—can affect what we do. We need
to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that
stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the
freest and most open public sphere since the village square.”

The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he
said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to
corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to
rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to
openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the
disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to
succeed.

“Pessimism is never useful,” he said. “Realism is useful, understanding the
forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will.’ ”

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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher,
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