Lewis Carroll knew nonsense. He pretty much invented the verse version. We, who live in a country in which nonsense defines national behavior, are effectively blind to that reality, judging by our universal acceptance of it. We’ve been force-fed bullshit by ruling elites forever and, though bullshit is not nonsense, it’s the perfect cover for it.
Nonsense, by definition, has no rational basis and makes no sense. Bullshit, in contrast, is often coherent and plausible and disseminated by authority it has caused Americans to embrace reams of pernicious nonsense immeasurably ruinous to them.
Goebbels assertion that the Big Lie, repeated and robustly defended, could enlist a people against itself was proven for us by Reagan’s “morning in America” and Obama’s “hope and change” hustles, classics of bullshit, that enabled the infliction of much sanctimonious idiocy on H.L.’s Booboisie.
Carroll’s masterwork–The Jabberwocky–opens with this couplet:
“Twas Brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the Borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.”
Given where we are today, to paraphrase Reagan, it’s Brillig in America.
This has much to do with the Buffoon-in-Chief, yes, but his is only a part, and not the most grievous, in the complex of existential idiocy under which Americans ignorantly labor. To take the greatest, most odious examples of the screaming nonsense that encumbers us, start with what’s laughingly referred to by the Cognoscenti as “monetary policy”, viz.:
- Congress must “borrow” from somewhere the money it spends and rake it back in taxes to “pay” for services. Perfect nonsense. Relentless bullshit persuaded us this is so. It is not. Congress creates money from nothing because it’s empowered to do so, taxes aren’t “collected” but are written off to diminish the extant money supply, and they “pay” for absolutely nothing.
- Social Security and Medicare will go broke very soon if we don’t cut them because payroll taxes won’t pay their increasing cost. Purest nonsense. Congress could sustain and augment them forever if it would, without increasing taxes since taxes don’t “pay” for them. The will of Congress determines which programs are funded and which are not. It has always lavished money on elite financial entities with the closest ties to it through baldfaced bribery. That group does not include The American People.
- The world is full of nations that are evil, while we are not, and one of them is always determined to attack, invade and destroy us, so we must spend money that could make our education, health care, infrastructure, and natural environment the envy of the world, on war and preparing for it. Utter nonsense. No nation since 1812, has had any such intention. A roaring torrent of bullshit from our owners has enabled the poisonous Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex–Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman–and our coddled, stupidly generalled, over-teched military monstrosity to extract the life from us.
These are just the prime examples of the sick nonsense that rules us.
Carroll’s Jabberwocky had a hero and a triumphant, victorious ending. In our moral paralysis, we can’t look to heroes because their existence is another bullshit story that masks the nonsense we’ve been persuaded to live in.
What may resonate for us with the jolly madness of it, though, is that we have our own Jabberwock, our own hideous, ghastly monster, that lives by devouring us with the “claws that catch” and the “jaws that bite”, regardless of how brainlessly unaware of it we continue to be.
It is that tiny upper echelon of the Capitalist Cabal that owns and operates our criminal government like a Mafia racket.
It is that vicious, diabolical, unelected cadre of warlocks, ghouls and vampires that, using scientifically tested, academically ponderous, legally impenetrable glossalalia, creates and disseminates the vast compendium of bullshit and mythology that enslaves and dehumanizes our citizenry, and lives, like a parasite, a remora, a metastatic cancer, on the blood and flesh of its own country.
Is redemption possible? What can be done? What must we do to save ourselves, our children, our future, cry the good, honorable, innocent ones, who feel the dark truth and are horrified by it.
Another of America’s bullshit mantras is that all problems have rational solutions. Our Jabberwock will devour us unless we destroy it. There’s no instruction manual for that.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
The 21st Century