THE INFORMATION #1161
AUGUST 6, 2021
Copyright 2021 FRANCIS DIMENNO
dimenno@gmail.com
https://dimenno.wordpress.com
This is the wonderful thing about espionage, nothing exists any more.–William Stephenson
WHEN THIS WORLD CATCHES FIRE
BOOK FOUR: AND IF THE DEVIL COME SHOOT HIM WITH A GUN
PART SIXTY-ONE
279. READ MY FILE
“It’s the conspiracy fanatics, Purson, who are the bane of the Agency’s existence. Talk about failing to see the forest for the trees! Hemongway talked of a writer needing to have a foolproof bullshit detector. There are so many people out there who are in desperate need of one! People believe the strangest things. It would be better for them to know nothing than to know so many things that just aren’t so. There was once a magazine publisher who said, ‘There are more idiots than people, you know.’ Now, this is a profoundly undemocratic sentiment, and it goes against everything I believe, but in my heart I think he might have been on to something. There was also a British newspaper magnate, back in the 1960s I believe, who used to keep a personalized name plate on his big desk which read ‘It is twelve’. That was to remind him of the mental age of his average reader. He may have been too generous, at that. Many people still think as though they are only eight years old, and only slowly do they accrete a series of cant phrases to successfully navigate the adult world. ‘How ya been?’ ‘How’s the wife.’ ‘How ya feeling?’ ‘What about this weather?’ “Didja hear the latest?’ They even talk to their wives in the same clipped banalities. ‘How was your day’. ‘How’s the kids?’ ‘What’s for supper?’ ‘See if there’s anything good on.'”
“Now, some of these conspiracy fanatics aren’t even THAT clever. They seem to have the reasoning faculties of five-year-olds. They believe everything they see on television and everything they read while moving their lips in some crackpot gossip magazine. I believe that it was Piaget who said that children of that age have trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy and reality from illusion. After all, we are well aware that children of all ages just love magic clowns who can make animal balloons. You know, it seems to me that a great many people are no better than clever apes–they know how to grub in a hollow log for fat termites using a forked stick, but the higher reasoning eludes them. They always without fail seize upon some bete noire–usually it’s the Jews, or the international bankers, or Negroes, or the communists–and they’re convinced that their sworn enemy of the moment is the cause of all their woes. And the world’s woes as well. “
“Well, now, that’s just crazy.”
“Craziness indeed. That’s all it is with these conspiracy nutters—sheer craziness. Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy! That’s all they can ever talk about! It’s as if a bolt had gone loose in their heads. Everywhere you turn. It’s not as though ordinary people with wives and jobs and a mortgage and kids have time to worry about such things! No, it’s usually some embittered crank who didn’t get into the college of his choice, if he even went to college at all. He’s convinced that the rest of the world doesn’t “understand” him because he’s so brilliant. While the truth is that people just don’t like him because he’s weird. He smells bad. He doesn’t brush regularly, let alone floss. He’s got pimples and running sores. He’s not exactly a big hit with the girls. He’s weak and flabby, like his intellect. His voice is dull and monotonous and without any real affect. He doesn’t talk with you–he talks at you. He’s always interrupting you to make some urgent point, which is actually at best only tangential to the conversation. All the symptoms of a classic schizotypal character.”
“I get a lot of those.”
“I’m sure you do, Officer; I’m sure you do. We’re talking about some genuine bull-goose loonies, here. They’re everywhere! We’ve always had them, but you should read some of the nutty letters we get nowadays. ‘My mind is always present in the mind of everyone else, so I think I would be a great asset to your fine spy service.’ ‘Space aliens are putting nerve gas in our chewing gum. Please make them stop before they kill all the secretaries.’ ‘I am not afraid to die because I know I will go to heaven, to play with Saint Peter’s friendly dogs.’ These are people who have hit their thumb with a hammer–and they blame the nail for not being where they tried to hit it. Magical thinking–that’s what most of them are all about. Easy prey for some showboating charlatan. But magical thinking is neither magical, nor does it constitute any definable form of higher thought. Like I told you before–average is dumb. And so half the people in this country are actually dumber than dumb. Most of them can’t even spell simple words of one or two syllables. And once they get a fixed notion in their empty heads, they cling to it with a death grip, despite all evidence to the contrary. They even bring up their pet peeve when there’s no particular occasion to do so. Talk about the weather and they’ll darkly mutter something about international Jew bankers, and spy satellites, and the Russians. Few of these crazed idealists seem to have the wit to separate fancy from fact. Ultimately, they are incapable of separating their fixed notions of what they believe to be so from the ways of the world as it actually is. Like I said, in my opinion, it is better by far to be a blank slate than to be a misinformed, self-styled, ‘expert’. ‘I have my idiotic fairy tales to guide me. And you can’t take that away from me.’ This begs the question: Who would want them? Cognitive dissonance is the order of the day.”
“I’m sorry, Professor, but…what’s that?”
“Refusing to accept the evidence of your senses. I imagine that if you were to contrive a way to somehow educate our people in the art of logic, some of them might wake up and dare to be wise. But the smart money is against it. A lot of people are too damn tired to even open their eyes, let alone their minds. And nowadays we have a whole new generation of ignoramuses to contend with, as all the daffy hippies are being superceded by angry punks, who are merely anarcho-syndicalists at best, and idiotic nihilists by and large, sporting Nazi regalia and mutilating themselves with safety pins. They live, by and large, in a world of spilled beer and broken bottles. And their idiots who listen to so-called music that’s guaranteed to make them even dumber. Some of them somehow manage to go to some dreary college out in the hinterlands, where they fall under the influence of a small-time Professor and, with his enthusiastic encouragement, they latch onto a pet philosopher or intellectual guru, who will merely nurture their frothy immaturity and give them the barest patina of a rationale. Bravo, lads! That’s the way to do it! At least, if you want to impress dullards with your moth-eaten hand-me-down aphorisms. In other words, you can spend twenty-thousand dollars giving a child an inferior education–and you will only produce a trained donkey who will bray the sage maxims of Franz Fanon and wow the suckers down in Tijuana with his cunning rhetorical stunts.
“I suppose I shouldn’t speak completely ill of students, though–without them, we educators might be out of a job, and then–ha ha ha ha ha!–we’d actually have to work for a living. You know, Purson, moral rot is bad enough–I’ve seen quite a bit of it in my day, and, in your job, so have you, I’m guessing. But when I survey the landscape of what I can only characterize as our cultural and intellectual rot, I despair for my country. Truly educated people are few and far between. To make matters worse, all the most clever people in America–many of whom are lazy cowards–are convinced that there’s big money to be had by selling broken toys to sick children–and who’s to say they’re wrong? It’s the old panem et circenses all over again.”
“Say what?”
“Bread and circuses. Give the public what they want, tell them what they want to hear, tell them that they’re actually smart and well-informed and irresistible to members of the opposite sex, and most of them will buy whatever you’re selling, except, of course, for cranks and misfits and malcontents–and who cares about them? It’s all–heh heh–‘beneath’ them. But–as for me–personally? I’d rather be over your head…than beneath your notice.
“But perhaps, Purson, you are becoming slightly bored by all this…history. Do you have any questions for me?”
“Tell me more about my file.”
“I’m just now getting to that.”
And then he told me.
280. A SOLDIER IN THE ARMY OF THE LORD
“Well, Officer Purson, let us discuss your file, then. We find that as a subject, you are remarkably free of racial animus. You don’t seem to have many black friends. In fact, you don’t seem to be very social at all. From what we’ve been able to observe, you come across as a somewhat dull fellow. No whooping it up with the boys on the weekend. We know what television shows you watch–Sixty Minutes and Jeopardy. We know what newspaper you read–the Noxtown Patriot Press. We know what library books you check out–thrillers, mystery novels, and books about crime. We even know what cereal you eat every morning–Special K. And what you have for lunch–cottage cheese. You’ll forgive me for saying so, but we also know that there’s nothing particularly kinky about your preferences–no hankering after small boys or underage trim. Even the pornography you read is boring. Playboy? Really? In this day and age? Don’t tell me–let me guess–you only read it for the articles.”
“The cartoons, actually.”
“Well…to each his own. My point, Purson, is that you may be black, but you don’t really ACT black. You seem as though you can talk to just about anybody, and fit in anywhere. And that is something of a rare quality. I’ve observed your demeanor even as I say the most outrageous things. Attentive, but not credulous. It seems to me that you’re just the kind of man we’re interested in…sponsoring.”
All of the Professor’s talky talk talk about me being a recruit in the army of the good guys sounded very attractive. I could feel for the first time that I was really accomplishing something. A black police officer gets very little respect. His own people hate and fear him, and his fellow officers look down on his. Call in sick one day, and you’re “lazy”. Never mind that some of the white officers call in sick every Monday because they’re too hungover to do the job. Never mind that there are white officers who try to avoid any situation where they might run into some trouble. Never mind that all the best overtime shifts get doled out to the whites, and if a black man tries to get in on the action, why, he’s “gaming the system.”
And…when Otremo made that crack about black children killing each other for their sneakers? That truly stung. I had a whole lot of things I now wish I had said to him. About lynching. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Segregation. Inferior schools. Routine humiliations. Stores that wouldn’t sell you Coke but made you buy Pepsi instead. “Nigger Coke,” they called it. About being afraid to speak loudly; sometimes…being afraid to speak at all. Being afraid all the time, because you never knew what white people might do. Even a wrong look could land you on a work gang in the coal mines, from where few people ever came out intact. If you had a nice car you were uppity and if you drove an old broke-down jalopy you were poor trash. The average white person would go mad in one week if he had to put up with what we deal with every day of our lives.
But I didn’t talk about any of this. Instead, while Otremo talked, I thought some more about my people. MY people.
*1 SALUTATION
STEPPENWOLF
MONSTER
https://youtu.be/Sk3sURDS4IA
ALSO SEE:
SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES
SKIN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reU-i6qZCrY&list=PLfGibfZATlGoMF3iuRNLFB10-f2dNtUto&index=12
2*REFERENCE
THE MENACE OF THE WOBBLING MOON
www.axios.com/nasa-moon-wobble-coastal-flooding-c4623977-31be-44d6-a73a-1da9107f3316.html
3*HUMOR
“Easier than slapping a sick baby off the piss pot.”
www.texasmonthly.com/articles/more-colorful-texas-sayings-than-you-can-shake-a-stick-at/
ALSO SEE:
BARBRA STREISAND
I’M FIVE
www.facebook.com/barbrastreisand/videos/performing-im-five-from-my-first-tv-special-mynameisbarbra-in-1965-watch-now-on-/10155339918495124/
4*NOVELTY
THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED
www.thestacksreader.com/jerry-goes-to-death-camp/
ALSO SEE:
SINATRA
www.goodreads.com/book/show/177908.His_Way
Sarah Vowell’s prescient and hilarious condemnation of “My Way”: “[It] pretends to speak up for self-possession and personal vision when, at base, it only calls forth the temper tantrums of 2-year-olds or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun.”)
thenoise-boston.com/2016/02/book-review-12/
5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
GEORGE FLOYD MURAL CRUMBLES
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/07/14/george-floyd-mural-toledo-crumbles-after-possible-lightning-strike/7963155002/
6* DAILY UTILITY
TWELVE TYPES OF LOSERS
www.bolde.com/12-types-losers-spot-late/
*7 CARTOON
KOOL-AID MAN VS. THE THIRSTIES
Quality 80s fare. Once again, Marvel is an avid commodity pimp.
www.misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics81.html
8*PRESCRIPTION
MOUSE UTOPIAS
www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/
9* RUMOR PATROL
STARLAND VOCAL BAND & CONSPIRACY
This opens up a whole can of worms.
Blind Items Revealed #24 – Reader Blind
March 7, 2021
A number of decades, missing girls in different cities could sometimes go unreported for awhile. If investigators had noticed a series of disappearances when they happened, they might have connected it to a band playing in town at the same time.
This pop group had one monster hit that has been in a number of films including a hit comedy where some of the cast members sang it. On the strength of this hit, the band briefly had their own TV show which helped launch the career of the permanent A+ comic/host.
The members of the group had very close relationships to one another but in fact they had met because they believed in the same thing – A darker faith involving sacrifice and blood. It wasn’t hard to find girls on the road that wouldn’t be noticed as missing for a while.
www.nationandstate.com/2021/07/04/blind-items-revealed-24-reader-blind/
What kind of maniac came up with the name The Starland Vocal Band in the first place?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starland_Vocal_Band
Though I suppose it was an improvement (of sorts) on their previous names.
SEE:
AFTERNOON DELIGHT
https://youtu.be/wu1UXCdyNo0
ALSO SEE:
ON LETTERMAN
https://youtu.be/KvhImD2VWrc
10*LAGNIAPPE
EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN
SAND
https://youtu.be/4BiODjvVEOw
TABULA RASA
https://youtu.be/uzEsimSWjNA
PERPETUUM MOBILE
https://youtu.be/TlCKUxq00j0
11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF OTHER MEDIA
DUNG BEETLE WORSHIP
www.wired.com/2014/07/fantastically-wrong-dung-beetle-worship/
ALSO SEE:
THE GUARDIAN ON TRUMP
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house
QUOTE: There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
It doesn’t take much in the way of intelligence to come to that conclusion.
Also: Narcissistic, bipolar, paranoid, and quite possibly psychopathic. A full menu of mental illnesses. Not to mention his character flaws.
Plus: Grandiosity, megalomania, bigotry, and illiteracy.
*11A BOOKS READ AND REVIEWED
AMERICAN CULT. CHAPMAN, ED. ****1/2
BIG WHITE GHETTO. WILLIAMSON. ***1/2
BLACK WIDOW 1. THE TIES THAT BIND. ****
DANGEROUS PERSONALITIES. NAVARRO & POYNTER. ****1/2
THE DICTIONARY OF BODY LANGUAGE. NAVARRO. ****
DIRTY BIOLOGY. GRASSET. ***1/2
DREAMING EAGLES. ENNIS & COLEBY. ****
FAT. HOFER. ****
KILLADELPHIA 1. ***
KILLADELPHIA 2. ***
MAKING WHITENESS. HALE. ****1/2
MY BODY IN PIECES. HEBERT. ***1/2
SCIENCE COMICS: THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM. ****
SHANG-CHI 1. BROTHERS & SISTERS. ***1/2
SHOCKING TRUE STORY. SCOTT. ***1/2
A SHOT IN THE ARM. BROWN. ****
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME. BLACKMON. ****
THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW. WOODWARD. ****1/2
SUPERMAN ACTION COMICS 4. METROPOLIS BURNING. ****
YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TO LACEY. RUFFIN & LAMAR. ****
12* CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
FREE WILL
Of course, there really is no such thing as “free will”. A quaint, outmoded 20th century concept.
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/
Free will is neither will nor free.
Your free will, such as it is, is paradoxically your tyrant.
dimenno 