Selling Slime

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). –From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. That's exactly how I find myself way too often, of late.

Either I've become inclined toward quasi-conspiratorial departures from reality or... in reality, am becoming aware of a whole lot of difficult to ignore batches of insane items that if listed, says one of two things about me… Either I'm nuts or I'm not. Both are equally troubling to me.

I really didn't notice when it happened exactly, but satellite television stopped transmitting "raw feeds" that had no commercials with unregulated international content and up popped Dish Network and DirecTV. Cable TV providers also now make you pay to have more commercials selling needless crap perpetually, shoveling it into every living room in America. Both seem to have been created and produced by someone directly out of whatever daydream inspired Orwell to write "1984"; more interested in indoctrination than entertainment. In America, TV has become "the drug with a plug" and like all reinforced addictions, it presents merely the illusion of value and satisfaction.

Its programming has openly and unapologetically presented and pronounced itself oracle-vision from on high which all sheeple should gaze slack-jawed into in order to receive the very foundation of their state sponsored entitlement to magical knowledge without learning. The bountiful trough of revisionist history set forth before our lambs, heaped with fuzzy theory, supposition, speculation, fantasy, and outright historical fallacy.

I remember how the words in an old Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention song entitled "I Am The Slime" seemed funny, exaggerated, and entertainingly absurd back in the early 1970's when I first heard them, but now have proven to have been prophetic. Thanks Frank!

I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little had changed
I am the tool of the government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I am the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I am the slime oozin out
From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't got for help...no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks..
Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin along on your livinroom floor

I am the slime from your video
Cant stop the slime, people, lookit me go

This year, analog TV reception was eliminated and replaced with digital, making obsolete everybody's older equipment and eliminating real public (underground) broadcasting.

Recently I heard it announced that libraries were destroying children's books because they may have been printed with lead-based ink. Really? Are kids eating books nowadays?

I find that I am unable to make excuses for my perceptions. Saying "It must be the same with every generation" just doesn't wash. Grasping for, and clinging onto what's remembered of "the good ole days" may be an easy dismissal to hang around the necks of people, but it only really works to marginalize them if they really did eat those lead-laden books I mentioned earlier. I don't remember eating any books… and I really think I'd remember something like that. After all, it's not like misplacing your car keys if one day you wake up to find volumes H-M and W-Z of the Encyclopedia Britannica mysteriously missing, leaving voids on the bookshelf in the family den.

Truth is, government has grown to never before seen size, power, and dimension with more tentacles co-opting a media and medium that is no longer bound by truth, ethics, morality, civic value or pertinence.

Dynamic sales methods that I learned how to employ while training to sell "home improvements" when I was working my way through college have become the new standard for unabashed and popularly practiced political prowess. I remember them as vividly as the smarmy guy that taught them. He was the original Leisure Suit Larry, except his name was Harold. Harold was a movie quality character. He had no patience or value for shame, ethics, or moral fiber. Greed and "the sale" were his religion. To Harold, aspiration to achieve the absence of those "character flaws" was the highest form of artistry and the only thing about mankind worthy of admiration by the practitioners of selling. If Harold were here now, he'd surely recognize that the world is full of mooches and marks for the fleecing. Hell, I think he'd be a prominent pillar of society nowadays. Probably a political powerhouse! He was definitely a man ahead of his time.

I see and hear Harold in nearly every government talking head, pundit, and media "star" blabbering slime from the video onto my living room floor. The media perpetuates whatever salaciousness they think might keep the viewer from switching channels. The government's professional politicians have become adept at little more than developing their own brand of artful salaciousness, custom-made to appeal to both the transmitting and receiving mouth-breathers that surround us.

I once learned that TV commercials were intentionally designed so that a third grader could understand, comprehend, and most importantly appreciate them. I used to only think that was to employ first brain imprinting like that of animal training, but sadly, I've come to realize that they design TV commercials and programming that way in order to communicate more effectively to about 60% of America. Equally as troubling is that from that 60% come way too many registered voters. The exception has become the rule.

Recently, I began reading The Federalist Papers, having been so terrified by the nation's recent government's lurch to somewhere so far to the left of reality that I needed to reassure myself that what swirls around in my head representing itself as an understanding of history was not just some warped shadow of a memory of a teenage hallucination leftover from some bad four-way from way back in the day.

I made it to just about the middle of the introduction written by Alexander Hamilton when a couple of things occurred to me.

One was that our Founding Fathers were brilliant and completely committed to The United States of America. Personal greed and self-aggrandizement were nowhere to be found within their agendas. They were true and honorable leaders of free men and women.

Another thing that occurred to me was that the true history and memory of them, as well as the future they crafted for this nation has been not only abandoned by our present government, it is being redefined, edited and adulterated.

How can this be allowed to happen? Is this what the beginning of the end of America looks like? Where is the counter-balance that checks this wrong? Who will listen? Why is nobody standing against the obvious destruction of America's identity? What can I do, and who will stand with me to demand this stop happening. What bright light can be wielded to illuminate the truth about the trick; the gimmick; the scam?