Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Fighting Outrage with Outrage

Having watched ALL the videos, my humble opinion is "a plague on all your houses." Not so much the hapless participants at the Lincoln Memorial as the viral legions of "outraged" spectators who turned a circus of misperception into a carnival of righteousness and condemnation.

HAVEN'T YOU ALL GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

Trust me when I say that OUTRAGE has a right-wing bias. There are several reasons for this. One is that the right is fueled by outrage. A second reason is that the Mostly Seagulls Media is easily manipulated by the right-wing outrage Wurlitzer, which is heavily subsidized. The third is that you can't beat something with nothing. Liberals seem to think that outrage is some kind of spontaneous expression of disapproval. WRONG! (see points one and two) It's one thing when a mob of MAGA-hatted brats are disrespectful to a Native American elder beating a drum. But it is something else entirely different when a restaurant owner politely refuses service to a lying press secretary. One is just kids-will-be-kids, the other is incivility.

Having heard that a public relations firm associated with Mitch McConnell wrote the exculpatory explanation for the poster-boy Covington kid, I begin to wonder if maybe that firm staged the whole incident as sort of a rhinestone Reichstag Fire. Because, you know, everything the right doesn't want you to pay attention to is a false-flag carried out by crisis actors.

Maybe if people were busy building the General Strike, they wouldn't have so much time for pointless spectacles of outrage.

3 comments:

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I still have not figured out what really went down there on the Mall. Maybe at this point it does not even matter, although I guess it does. But the story has now shifted to being about the story about the story about the story...

Alan G Isaac said...

Of possible interest:
https://www.facebook.com/jeffrocks1971/posts/10157990637982977

Sandwichman said...

Alan,
Yes, Jeff Neal's account on his Facebook page is very good and fair, which I guess means it accords with what I saw. I didn't watch four hours of video but probably around a half an hour catching most of the "highlights." I think it is a testament to the civility of ALL the immediate participants that there were no punches thrown, no spitting or other projectiles. The entire confrontation was symbolic. The interaction on the scene was certainly less offensive than some of the viral, virtual response and subsequent PR spin.

One intriguing thing I would like to add is that ALL of the participants were acting -- or imagined they were acting -- in the name of some higher spirituality. The Black Israelite guys were thumping an old testament bible, the Covington boys were in D.C. to demonstrate their patriarchal religious opposition to abortion, the Omaha drummer was performing a prayer song. Maybe YHWH or whatever He/She/They calls Him/Her/Themself, is trying to tell us something? ("you're on your own, kid")