Mills75 wrote:Of course, if more people were saying, "Just what the hell is going on here?", would we even know it? I fear that the powers that be have too strong a stranglehold on the media for us to get an accurate and reliable impression of how many people are dissenting.
This is a cogent point. In his book
Kent State, Michener states that many of the students interviewed (he had literally hundreds of interviews conducted by his graduate assistants with students who returned home at the end of the term in which the Kent State massacre occurred) told the researchers that their parents had told them in so many words that if they had been at Kent State, then the Guard ought to have shot them. The nation was horribly polarized in 1970. But when more than a hundred thousand people marched in Washington, and they were housewives, doctors, lawyers, longshoremen, farmers--i.e., ordinary people--the rhetoric of right-wing warhawks grew hysterical. They were fighting a rearguard action from the point at which it became clear that opposition to the war was not solely the province of "long-haired freaks."
I think that governments pretty well do what they want until such point as it becomes evident that the tide of public opinion has set against a policy, at which point politicians--addicted to re-election--begin to bail, and it's every man for himself. I don't personally believe that it has gotten so bad that government can unilaterally control the media, but there certainly is a corporate cowardice in operation, in my never humble opinion, that mitigates against genuine investigative journalism when it comes to an administration (of which ever party) unless and until the cat is already out of the bag and it seems safe to risk the bottom line through opposition.
Because fortunately, most of the other participants are quite interesting
are you suggesting that you want me to stop ridiculing your nihilistic, destructive attacks on my country.
