We say that the Media Class selected Obama, funded his Primary and Presidential campaigns, orchestrated his propaganda throughout its Media outlets, demonized his opposition and provided the same support for the Democrat Party. We do not pretend that this is the beginning and end of the explanation. The Media Class is not big enough or powerful enough to take power and govern without allies. Given that the Media Class has its own roots in the political Left and seeks to impose a social and moral revolution on the American people, it is understandable that it has made alliances with various Leftist constituencies. Given also that the Media Class has an urgent agenda that is not yet widely popular with the American people, it is understandable that it is sympathetic to constituencies that wish to expand the role of government to the point where government can control the masses in every way. Thus the Media Class and its politicians are in alliance with the Leftist Academia and with the Leftist Unions. Since the Unions are strongest in the public sector we should not be surprised that public Service Unions and their muscle-power are now being employed on the frontlines of Town Hall meetings.
Voters have short memories and it is just as well for this President and his Congressional comrades. As the US and Allied military death toll in Afghanistan grows by the day – whilst the situation on the ground looks gloomier and gloomier – we should remember how Obama, when Presidential candidate, posed as an expert military strategist. Once in office, he promised, he would speedily pull the troops out of Iraq (which he categorized as a military distraction and a symbol of the Bush Administration’s failures) and wage the war against terrorism where it really counted, in Afghanistan. Talk comes cheap, especially for this Media-sponsored President who surely properly belongs only on the silver screen. Some troops have been withdrawn from Iraq on his orders and the haste now threatens to undo the real success that was being achieved there. Meanwhile there is no evidence of a radical and transforming strategy in Afghanistan and Obama seems unable to woo the Muslim world with his expansive speeches. Indeed the Muslims of Pakistan and Afghanistan seem even more belligerent and their brothers in Iran, Palestine, Thailand and East Africa have not been placated by a quasi Muslim in the White House.
Besides recalling Obama’s confident ‘War and Peace’ speeches, it is also worth recalling the anti-war fervor that for eight long years dominated the streets of the USA. What has happened to the Peace warriors? Where now are the Crawford campers inspired and led by Cindy Sheahan; where are the San Francisco marchers; and where are the campus protests against American Imperialism in Afghanistan? Well, the first explanation for their absence is that many of those people were never really against war, only against a Bush war. The second explanation is that anti-war agitation is only part of a larger bag that includes anti-capitalist environmentalism, socialized health care, nationalized education (Leftist propaganda), more spending on the Arts, open borders, same-sex marriage and anti-Christian and anti-free speech legislation. Scratch a war protester (not recommended if you want to avoid lice, genital warts and AIDS) and you get the whole rag-bag Leftist agenda. Since Obama is giving the Leftists so much of this agenda, many seasoned protesters are willing to give him a pass on the broken peace promises. Lastly though, I have no doubt that the prime reason for the seeming silence of the little gang of Cindy Sheahan followers is that the Media Class has abandoned them. Since Obama is its man and since he is frantically busy pushing through so much of the Media Class agenda, the Mainstream Media (MSM) is presenting a picture of public satisfaction with his Administration. When any kind of protest against him is so widespread that it cannot be ignored, the Media has to move into top gear painting it as the work of thugs, manipulated morons and sinister and un-American Nazis. The truth about the unwashed street people and most Leftist campus agitators is that deprived of the oxygen of Media publicity, they quickly lose interest. Sorry, Cindy, but you are no longer of interest or use to the Media crowd who once reported your every move in Texas so your followers have packed their sandals, dirty sleeping bags and deserted you. C’est la vie!
I began this article with the truism that voters have short memories and that that is good news for Obaama, for not only the Afghan war is looking bad but the employment figures also make nonsense of his pre-election boasts about magically putting America back to work. He also posed as a deficit hawk, a warrior for Government transparency (no birth certificate or personal records revealed), a healer of racial divisions, a would-be veto-er of pork spending and the trail blazer for a new conciliatory politics. Has any President ever been such a fraud and so quickly revealed as such by his actions? The answer is of course, ‘no’ but then has any President ever enjoyed the complete protection of the MSM and the financial sponsorship of a rich and powerful ruling Class? With the benefit of an unending torrent of lies and news concealment by the MSM and funded by the Nation’s richest and most privileged people, can any fraudulent politician fail? Obama has only to continue his promotion of a Leftist expansion of government and the implementation of a new and anti-Christian morality in order to earn the full and awesome support of the Media Class and their rich and dissolute allies. What conservative political opponents can survive the hugely-funded hostile campaigns of George Soros, Herbert and Marion Sandler, David Geffen, Pat Stryker and Tim Gill, to name just a few of the many billionaires who are determined to make a moral revolution in the USA? Tim Gill, for example, is a homosexual billionaire from Denver, Colorado who claims to be ‘married’ to his ‘husband’ Scott Miller. Presumably, Gill is a ‘pretend female’ who submits his rectum to being regularly sodomized by Mr. Miller. If I have got this wrong and have not fully understood the mechanics of homosexuality I apologize to Mr. Gill (or is it Mrs.?) and welcome his correcting email to our website. Mr./Mrs. Gill and Mr. Miller are, of course within their rights to pretend to sexual identities denied them by nature and to use any bodily orifice for sex, but Mr./Mrs Gill is determined to change the people’s definition of marriage to more comfortably fit his fantasies and very unhygienic and unnatural practices. He has poured millions upon millions of dollars into campaigns to unseat Christian Congressmen and has apparently succeeded in replacing some 50 out of 70 targeted socially conservative Republicans. His money goes to myriad organizations that masquerade under names that hide their homosexual aims. ‘Human Rights’ is the favorite name adopted by those campaigners who believe that the public might balk at the homosexual agenda. Gill’s money might not be enough to succeed with voters except that the MSM supplies the necessary camouflage. There are no MSM revelations about these homosexual outsiders with a vested interest intervening in the political process with vast wealth. The MSM is predictably silent (same agenda, of course) yet it is always ready to run headlined scare stories about Mormons, Christians and wealthy conservatives (if only there were wealthy conservatives!) exercising a sinister influence at election time. My point about Soros, Gill and the rest is that the MSM could blow their cover at any time and alert and arouse the voters, but it will never do so for the Media Class shares the same moral agenda and same enemies and deliberately colludes in keeping them below the radar.
Dishonesty and news selectivity are so pervasive across the whole MSM that it is too exhausting for this writer to do more than give the occasional example. Today’s Wall Street Journal’s Front Page World Wide news column included this gem: “Youths in a Paris suburb burned cars and buses, a night after unrest sparked by the death of a teen fleeing police”. Since this was all that the reporter wrote and the editor allowed, we are left wondering who the rioters were. Perhaps they were Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Plymouth Brethren, Budhists or even White native French Catholics, yet somehow I am drawn to the conclusion that they were Muslim and that the WSJ, like most of the MSM, has an agenda that precludes us from knowing. By the way, is this not a news item worthy of more than a brief sentence?
Recently I wrote about the decline of popular music since the 1960’s and linked this to the rise of the new Media Class. Last weekend in the WSJ Terry Teachout, its excellent theater critic, wrote a piece headlined “Can Jazz Be Saved?” His view was that the jazz audience is withering away as it ages and is not being replenished. He is correct, and jazz (at least almost all jazz that is musically worthwhile) is doomed just like good popular music. Indeed the two were closely related and will soon disappear together. I was never an expert on popular music but jazz I know something about. It was occasionally a central and influential part of the popular music scene, as well as having a folk and musical identity of its own. Jazz musicians were usually the most innovative instrumentalists of their day and it was a dynamic and progressive music. Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker (Surely the greatest musician of the Twentieth Century and this one!), Stan Kenton, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and many others were cutting edge innovators yet none lost their roots in African folk music and European popular music. Jazz flourished in bars (US), pubs (the UK), dance halls, local night clubs and Church halls and in order to do so it had to find a paying audience of individuals. This meant it had to appeal to the senses as well as the brain. Since it is a music requiring a lot of instant invention (improvisation) it is important that jazz musicians have a fund of past melodies and emotionally rich life experiences.
I am sure jazz music suffered from the 1970’s rise of the Media Class and its ‘infantilization’ of the public’s entertainment but I also saw at first hand other destructive forces at work. One was the nationalization process. This is how I can best describe the rise of the University entertainment circuit and the development of publicly-financed Arts centers. Universities from the 1960’s onwards not only were greatly expanded in number, but received enormous sums of public money for student entertainment. Along with the spread of tax-funded Arts centers this enabled music to be subsidized by unwitting taxpayers. At first, Universities and Colleges mostly featured intelligent and popular music and excellent jazz groups like the MJQ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet were able to play to large concert audiences. But subsidization and the consequent placing of music budgets into the hands of non-commercial College fund-holders soon proved to be the death-knell for listenable jazz. Colleges began to have hugely expensive Saturday night entertainments with headline Rock bands in the Great Hall and other music on the fringes to satisfy the claims of variety. Jazz musicians, now freed from commercial restraints, were also freed from self discipline. Jazz became a self-conscious Art form, instrumental technique replaced everything else, and musicians and critics only admired jazz that was incomprehensible and ‘new’. Even good musicians who had learned their jazz in dance halls and night clubs began to regard themselves as ‘Artists’ who should have silent audiences sat in concert halls. The new intellectuals of the Media loved this elitist stuff and jazz mostly disappeared from the bars and pubs where it had always drawn sustenance from the happy, down-to-earth drinkers and revelers who sometimes didn’t listen but were tolerant. Latin music stepped in to the dancers’ void and for a while some jazz musicians regained a connection with listeners’ emotions and feet through Bossa Nova and Cuban music. Jazz musicians had always been strongly connected with the bar people (the downfall of many, healthwise) and the artisans but soon all young musicians progressed though music colleges like Berklee where technique was all and humor and emotion were never learned. Today’s jazz, more technically accomplished than ever before is emotionally sterile and appeals only to the diminishing coterie of fellow musicians. Today’s jazz musicians, like classical musicians and their followers, agitate for public funding for their ‘Art’ form. In doing so they unwittingly adopt the same aspirations as welfare recipients, which is to become marginalized and useless.
Something else also drove jazz and popular adult music from the bars of the UK. Indeed the same thing is driving the wonderful, historic and richly varied pubs out of business at a rapid rate. It is the impulse of the Media Class and its Leftist comrades to destroy the old culture. Through drink-drive laws, health and safety regulations and taxation, the pubs have become unprofitable except for the giant new bars of city centers that cater for the mindless young victims of the modern rootless nihilistic culture. Real adults (now restricted to well-over 30’s) middle-aged people and elderly people are no longer the mainstay of pub life. They cannot afford the over-taxed pint and taxi-fares, or tolerate the loud rock music and the yobbish youth behavior of modern pub life. Neither do they wish to enter the grotesque ‘Gay ‘ bars that have emerged from under the wet and slimy stones of the post-Media Class tolerant and diverse society. At some level I believe that the Leftist Media Class revolutionaries who now shape social life in the UK realized that the old pubs were havens for those who rejected political correctness, wanted to cling to their native identity and were likely to breed counter-revolution. I see the BNP intends to develop pub-friendly policies if they ever get into power. Good for them though I doubt that the Party will allow jazz to once again become a music of the people. I expect it will be all Morris dancing, sea shanties and Elgar but even that will be an improvement on the current musical scene.
Peggy Noonan, a WSJ op-ed writer is rarely worth reading for she has taken to getting knee trembles over Obama. Some might say that she has taken the same route as the WSJ’s Gerald Seib in sucking up to the new President. However, the Health Care issue and the thuggish response of the Obama crowd to criticism seem to have lessened her ardor a little. Recently she wrote a piece and in it pretended to be expressing the views of a resurrected Richard Nixon lecturing Republican Party leaders. Her/his words were more appropriate for this website. “I am not sure the peeling off (of the American people from support of health care reform -ed.) has anything to do with you (the Republican Party -ed.). There’s something going on that I never foresaw, and it’s the fact that you don’t seem anymore to be the face of the party or of the movements within it. People with TV and radio shows do. Media people! There’s a plus to this but a minus, too. They’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room. You think they’re supporting you, but really they’re supplanting you! You’ve got to figure out how to come to the fore more and break through”.
Noonan is of course having a dig at Rush Limbaugh and the Radio Talk Show conservatives and saying that they have now usurped the role of the Party leaders. We say that this is true of all politicians whether Republican or Democrat for the Media Class, even its conservative mavericks, now have the power that once was exercised by politicians.
Finally one more example of blatant Media deception! It involves the UK’s much-persecuted and poorly funded BNP. This Party has an annual summer festival for its members. BNP families gather on a farm for a weekend, hear a few political speeches, do some folk dancing, listen to folk music, cook Yorkshire pudding, drink real ale, sing patriotic songs and sit around camp fires-weather permitting. This private and harmless small gathering enrages the rabble of the Left, ticks off the Establishment politicians, affronts the Nation’s politicized police chiefs and arouses the Media people no end. Orchestrated by the Media, funded by rich Leftists (is there any Soros money involved?) windily denounced by Brown, Cameron et al and getting a nod and wink from the police Chiefs, the thugs of the Trotskyist Front Anti-Nazi/Anti-Racism descend on the farm to create havoc. Clearly the BNP is the innocent target of organized violence. Here is the tax-funded BBC headline “Police to restrict BNP protesters”. Here we see the power of the Media to mis-inform for this implies that the BNP are the protesters and makes no mention of the Leftist thugs who actually cause the police presence. The BNP gathering requires no police presence. Let us hope the sun shines on the Festival and God protects the families gathered there from Red violence.