Monday, September 11, 2006
The Wheel
It just never stops.
Sometimes I wish I could throw a giant wrench into that wheel and make it stop. The Wheel of Lies. The Wheel of Illusion.
But of course I can't do that, not only because it's impossible and but also because I probably wouldn't do it if I had the chance.
I'm a professional propaganda writer. I used to be all about political propaganda. I still do that a bit, but now I've branched off into commercial propaganda, aka magazine writing. Peppy, up-beat, feel-good pieces about the subject of your choice. A dash of wit, a little aliteration and voila! the most boring, stupid or tragic aspects of human life become suitable fodder for passing time pleasantly in the doctor's office.
It all wears me down. Not the work. The work is fun. The concept horrifies me. When I think of the generations upon generations of deceptions, heaping up like silt, I want to retreat to a Buddhist monastery and never come out.
In Buddhism, we talk about a concept called the samsara, the eternal, self-perpetuating cycle of human delusion and suffering. I know it well.
Take my political work. Political parties in western democracies would like us to believe that their ideologies are deep, thoughtful analyses of the problems of the human condition. After 20 years of cranking out their crap, I've learned otherwise. All publicly communicated political "thought" can be summed up in one word: reaction.
A party in opposition engages in basic marketing strategies. They seek to condition voters to believe that everything their opponents are doing in government is fundamentally wrong, demonically wrong and that things would be better if only we did the opposite of what the government is doing. They rationalize, to themselves above all others, that these changes are necessary, but really they are aimed solely at creating a distinction in the minds of the voters.
I remember well the words of a former colleague, a spin-doctor for an opposition party, on hearing of some tragic event the government could not handle.
"It's worse than we hoped!" he beamed.
Of course, the governing party developed their "ideas" in reaction to the policies of the previous party in government. That previous government reacted to the one before that. And so on. The snake eats its own tail.
Look at the old British party nicknames, Tories and Whigs. Mountains of political literature have been piled up to extol or condemn both parties and their successors. How did it all start? Both terms originally meant "cattle thief", which was pretty much the worst thing you could call somebody in Stuart England. Variations on the theme of "you asshole!", in other words.
Lost in time, the whole business started as an insult contest that just kinda got out of hand. What I write for my political clients is not more intelligent or mature than the ancient British name calling. It's just longer. Which is lucky for me because I mostly get paid by the word.
posted by The Propagandist @ 4:26 PM,
3 Comments:
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At 8:56 PM,
X said...
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It looks like I probably will post comments here more often than the other sections......
Damn, what a boring guy I am!! -
At 4:46 AM,
Liam O'Brien said...
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Variations on the theme "you asshole!"
Reminds me of one of my favourite songs -- Dennis Leary's "I'm and asshole." Some good politics there in that John Wayne rant bit. . .
:-) -
At 8:43 PM,
said...
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Hmmmm...
