Because You Never Asked

     (This is amongst the earliest essays written for this series, probably done in1991. It should be read in conjunction with its sister, The Polls and the Gulf War.)

     All nations, especially this bastion of liberty known as the United States, would have us believe we live in an open society where ideas and opinions flow freely and unadulterated, providing us mullets with ample enough data to decide what is true, what is false, and what we should do about it. We are all supposedly armed with an impressive array of constitutionally, Divinely given rights that permit us to flap our mouths to a spittle-like froth, even if we wear a sheet and a pointy dunce cap or wrap our biceps in swastikas. With the use of such enlightened institutions, we can all better wend our ways through the treacherous minefields of human thought and decide just what we need so that our kids don’t end up sniffing glue from a paper bag in the bathroom of the local Mall.

     The scenario alluded to above could more realistically be called “Utopia”, a place still being sought unsuccessfully. The “truth”, like any other concept or object set forth in a society that sees itself in an almost purely mercantile way, is just another commodity to be marketed unobjectively by whoever is doing the selling. In today’s “New World Order Global Economy” there is only one truth: whatever you believe it is, it is somehow not quite that.

     The truth hurts.

     The people responsible for the truth in this hyper-commercial world are, quite naturally, the business community. They’d have us believe that what’s good for General Motors is what’s good for us. This gets us back to The Premise (that is, that  producing and selling at a maximum level is good. See essay “The Economy“), severely disputed by this writer and pitifully few others, and whether it is having a positive effect on this planet. As of now, our philosophical clout is so minimal, we are allowed to blubber away in essays like this, a handful of hummingbirds pecking away at the redwoods of dubious “truth” which are the fundaments of our society.

     But one cannot live without hope.

     So here I am, pecking away at my word processor in an effort to expose what has become our culture’s most fashionable perversion of the truth, that being the pernicious use of more and more polls to show us how we feel. What makes these polls so insidious is that they are supposedly our own opinions. It is a way of flattering ourselves, of making us feel as if we are participating and having something to do with something. It makes us feel as if we were making the decisions or creating the truth itself. This practice has become so widespread that the nation’s largest newspaper, USA TODAY, almost predicates its existence upon them.

     I don’t trust these polls. In a society where deceit, deception and hypocrisy are almost necessary weapons in the struggle to succeed, it would seem prudent to view them with some degree of skepticism. Why should I believe these polls set forth by a business elite who’s ultimate goal is the preservation of the status quo and their dominant role in controlling it? Which brings me to “The Polls and the Gulf War” … but first …

Relevant Material:
     “I haven’t read a newspaper in almost 8 months.”
     “That seems a very healthy thing to do.”
     “Yes. You can’t imagine the amount of toxins I’ve eliminated.” From the novel, “El Camino del Corazon” (The Road of the Heart), by the Spaniard, Fernando Sanchez Drago.

     “ … an opinion! I will not permit myself such ugly demagoguery … to let you have an opinion! As if opinions were good for anything more than to package and return at a good price to the consumer with an opinion! The people always pay a good price for their opinions.” From the novel “La Reina Roja” (The Red Queen), by the Spaniard, Gonzalo Suarez.