A LOOK INTO THE ABYSS What Elian Tells Us About Ourselves
By Edward Zehr
"They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans."
"Oh no, the reader thinks upon seeing the subtitle of this piece, not another article about Elian. But this series of articles is only incidentally about Elian -- it's really about us and what is happening to us. The Elian affair is like a mirror that reflects our hidden face, the one we never identify with ourselves because we always imagine that it belongs to somebody else."
"For example, I get e-mail from people who have chanced to read one or more of these articles and drop me a cordial line or two just to let me know what a numbskull I am. After all, the way I tell the story is not the way they have heard it. If my version were correct it would mean that they have been grossly misinformed, and the implications of that are too terrible to contemplate."
It would mean that in order to be properly informed they would have to stop skating over the surface of issues such as these, letting the anchor people do all the heavy lifting, and start doing their own thinking. But thinking can be kind of like work. Besides, a lot of people just don't quite have the hang of it. The raw material required to do one's own thinking consists of facts gathered from a wide variety of sources, not just the one that happens to materialize when the TV set is switched on."
"The "facts" presented by the mass media are typically folded into a smarmy batter of tendentious fiction calculated to elicit a response from the viewer that will be useful in advancing the hidden agenda which the presstitutes are paid to promote. The viewer, who does not comprehend that he or she is being manipulated responds emotionally, as though watching a soap opera or a TV series. After all, most people have a lot more experience responding emotionally to TV plots than they have at thinking critically and analytically. The script writer manipulates the emotions of the audience who respond in a predictable fashion. The viewers are being conditioned to react in a certain way. The leap from the semi-conscious emotional response evoked by TV "entertainment" to the conditioned response elicited by the politically motivated propaganda inserted into "news" presentations is a short one."
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
"The black-shirted, brown-shirted and red-banner-waving totalitarians of the twentieth century missed the point on a grand scale. All that rough stuff is really unnecessary in building a totalitarian state. In fact, if overdone, it tends to give the game away. Goebbels was the one who had it right, not Himmler. Concentration camps are a drain on the economy. That doesn't mean that you cannot turn the occasional group of retrograde religious fundies into crispy critters if they offer sufficient provocation. (It adds to the entertainment value of the spectacle if you torment the kiddies with noxious gas for, oh say five or six hours prior to lighting the bonfire -- the imperial Romans knew about these things). After the flames subside it will all be seen as the fault of the fundies, of course. That sinister, shadowy countenance we sometimes catch sight of, however fleetingly, in the mirror is never our own."
"Not that the knock on the door in the middle of the night is completely passe. In fact, it can prove quite useful if the courts insist upon being tedious about due process and all that nausea, and balk at issuing the legal paperwork necessary to drag away the designated victim in strict conformance with the law. No matter, hardly anyone understands the law, and who is going to tell them -- the press? They are far too preoccupied writing puff-pieces about Janet Reno to shed any tears over the late, great Fourth Amendment. Mind you, the original Gestapo were such sticklers for observing regulations they actually used to knock before entering. (Germans tend to be polite almost to a fault -- they would never dream of using the familiar form of the personal pronoun with a stranger, even if they were bashing his head in). Our own ski-masked, ninja-clad mili-cops do their nocturnal knocking with a battering ram. Small wonder Europeans consider us to be somewhat gauche."
"One of the most disconcerting aspects of the Elian affair is the public's response to Reno's Raid on the Miami family of Elian Gonzalez, in which the boy was illegally seized and whisked away to a secluded stronghold where, according to some accounts, he is being drugged and indoctrinated by his Cuban communist keepers. Ah! smirk the Clinton/Castro apologists, you don't know that the kid is being drugged and indoctrinated. But the evidence for this is already considerable and is accumulating rapidly. The troubling thing is that the apologists do not know that the kid is NOT being drugged and indoctrinated, and what's worse, they don't even seem to care. What this amounts to is a desecration of everything this country is supposed to stand for. The indifference of the public to such an obscene spectacle bodes ill for the survival of liberty."