We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, August 15, 2015

The Death of Satire

Click here to access article by Ted Gioia from The Daily Beast.

On Saturdays I had adopted a practice of featuring satire to lighten the weekend for most hard-working people, but I've found that I had to spend hours looking for something that really subverted conventional themes purveyed through corporate media by our masters in the ruling class. It's the same way this morning--I'm wasting my time.

I experienced the 1960s and 1970s when Mort Sahl, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Tom Lehrer, The Smother's Brothers TV show, and in the 1980s George Carlin among others attacked the political establishment. There is no one of their caliber today. The masters of what we have become, a New Empire Order (to paraphrase), have so frightened Americans with their almost weekly CIA false-flag terrorist events and FBI instigated terrorists that we no longer can ridicule and laugh at our rulers.