America's Prologue To Tragedy

By Dave Merrick —— Bio and Archives July 9, 2018

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Mr. Zuckerberg has now passed Warren Buffett in billions, taking over the spot for the third richest man on the planet. As Bob Dylan has said, "Money doesn't talk - it swears." And young Mark might be the most powerful guy on earth, even despite his wealth, simply because he runs a growing 'nation' that contains more people than Russia, China and the USA combined. As I have said before, to watch our Congress officially 'interrogate' him is an embarrassment. Except for a precious few, most all of them are fluttering like teenage girls in the early '60s asking questions of the Beatles. They don't behave that way because their kids have so much fun on Facebook. It's because he is the last man that vote-hungry politicians want to upset. And that kind of 'economy' is truly the present state of our union. It's all about votes, regardless of the cost.

Television and the Internet have helped a few generations of lazy and addle-brained parents to spawn bratty children/young adults who are tragically and grossly misidentified as geniuses

But the Internet's emerging family of Zuckerberg-types are the feared empresarios of the 21st century. And to best demonstrate how that works and where I'm going with all this, I will recall a little bit of the conversation I watched between a couple of rednecks on Facebook ... "Well, this is a free country! And, by God, I can say whatever I want. And that is my right." And to that his friend replied, “You're damned right!" How naïve. When you are standing on somebody else's property, and are there governed by their invitation's conditions - to which your very involvement confirms your total agreement - you have wandered out from under much of the umbrella of our Constitution's First Amendment. And, like it or not, just because you are an " 'merican", your hosts can shut you up pretty much whenever they like. You are there entirely at their grace, at least until our government grows a spine and begins to defend our freedoms in these cyber-realms (as our current, much-maligned president has strongly suggested). It is quite a sticky bowl of spaghetti. But nevertheless one that must be speedily recognized, addressed and untangled before our 'freedom of speech' and other liberties become only distant fond memories. These are scary times. And scarier still is the fact that so many of us are effectively kept lulled in a state of semiconsciousness due to an incurable addiction to a droning television/computer. Beyond that, scary compounding scarier, is the fact that there is absolutely nothing accidental about any of the programming flowing from that huge mother into the open minds of a nation of predominantly unwary sheep. We are corporately no longer the relatively alert people we used to be. And that is simply because so many of us allow a tv or a high-speed Internet to do our thinking for us. Benito Mussolini is credited with having said that 'sex is the poor man's opera'. As many might disparagingly attest, he said that long before the introduction of cable or satellite communication. Nevertheless, as time goes by at lightspeed, mankind is becoming more and more a bunch of distracted halfwits who are relinquishing their liberties - in exchange for some transitory satisfaction - to the people who "...control the horizontal and vertical." I'm surrounded by zombies staring and poking at their palms. Television and the Internet have helped a few generations of lazy and addle-brained parents to spawn bratty children/young adults who are tragically and grossly misidentified as geniuses. The new numbskull 'prodigies' have sadly acquired much of their 'life experience' and pseudo-sagacity through simply internalizing the hyperrealistic garbage they have been fed through a warm monitor. Google has taken the place of the Dewey Decimal System as well as the discipline and incidental discovery that was once involved with real study. And there may be nothing wrong with that, in itself - except that the parents and even a lot of the teachers who were formerly, cognitively present to oversee and temper the learning of tomorrow's hope are themselves now largely asleep at the switch.

The social networking, video librarying and mega-merchandising and money handling giants of the World Wide Web are, at this moment, working cooperatively to squelch out the voice of anything that runs counter to their agenda and eventual rule

So, yeah, we Americans can still, for the moment, say that we live in a free country. But because so many of us haven't done the vital homework and 'eternal vigilance' involved with even the minimal care and nurture of our luxurious freedoms, we are handing our liberty over to the new, billionaire empresarios/landlords. And those new landlords are mighty governors who have taken power just by being sharp enough to see and work the special circumstances we have afforded them in our lethargy and neglect. Unlike the obedient politicians they animate like marionettes, they don't have to worry about garnering the votes of the throngs of lazy people who are lining up to be part of their worshipful followings. The social networking, video librarying and mega-merchandising and money handling giants of the World Wide Web are, at this moment, working cooperatively to squelch out the voice of anything that runs counter to their agenda and eventual rule. That machine owns and runs the comparatively tiny 'swamp' that our president is working against hell itself to drain. Daily, that privately owned alliance is quietly closing its doors to the people who have so relied upon it in disseminating informative light to those who so rely upon it for vision. When the videos documenting the lies of the devil's most powerful politicos are, for one given excuse or another, no longer available on YouTube, then the 'community standards' editors policing Facebook won't have to work half so hard in keeping track of the 'troublemakers' who post them. Today, as the noose is tightening, we are sacrificing ourselves and truth for the cyber-illusion of a virtual utopia built by these new landlords. Very soon, our Constitution will have been - without a fight - completely replaced by the tyranny of the fine print in the "Terms and Conditions" or a "EULA*" composed by the devil himself. And, between now and the time we are called to account, we will not know what has hit us. "A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." -- James Madison 　 *End User License Aggreement