Caitlin Johnstone today, in litanic form on our – take your pick – narrative managers … opinion manufacturers … ideological gatekeepers … thought controllers.
This is just a selection. For the full list, read her post at source.
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that inhaling cigarette smoke into their lungs all the time is a nice thing to do …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that women should not have pubic hair. …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to men to spend hours at the gym building up muscles they’ll never actually need to use …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to drive to a room where they run on the spot for thirty minutes and then drive home again …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to worry about nations on the other side of the world who have never harmed them in any way …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to accept their nation’s wealth and resources being continuously used to kill strangers in endless wars …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that deliberately starving children whose government disobeys their government is no big deal …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that a two-party system which promotes the same policies in both parties should be called “democracy” …
Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley should control how humans communicate around the world …
Without extensive marketing none of this madness would be possible at all.
“Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that deliberately starving children whose government disobeys their government is no big deal …”
Que?
After Labour’s defeat last December I wrote a post – it’s a rum do … – linking the manufacture of consumer opinion by advertisers with that of political opinion by media.
Most of us in the West fail to see the lethal effect of sanctions on states which disobey Washington and Wall Street. To the extent we notice their suffering at all, we are given every encouragement to attribute it to the ‘failed’ policies of their leaders.
Neither of these things is accidental, but the product of carefully crafted propaganda blitzes.
The bit I’m having trouble with is the sentence construction.
“……whose government disobeys their government….”
In the context of the whole sentence as well as on it’s own this makes no sense?
You’re right of course, but overall context makes it crystal clear what is meant here. Caity pens day in day out, and the raw, under-edited feel of her output I see as a strength. She’s a highly accomplished writer and could, if she wanted and had the time, give a final polish to her syntax. I’m not sure the results would be any the better for it though.
She’s a warrior for truth. Though her grasp is deceptively sophisticated, her MO is the short stabbing sentence, vivid but not showy language, and straight-from-the-shoulder jabs. In lengthier, more complex pieces, such as those I sometimes go in for, ambiguities and grammatic lapses would matter. The risk of meaning being jeopardised would rise.
I’m a pragmatist, grammatically speaking – see my discussion of the Oxford Comma!
Yeah. Caitlin is generally right on the ball. She should be syndicated by all mainstream newspapers, if they were of course ‘news’ papers, and also, of course, she never will be.