A Thought To Remember

Borrowed from the pages of Harpers Magazine, a truly fine publication. I hope they don't mind.

This sums up well the tangled mess we find ourselves in where our people have been taught down is up, and wrong is right:

Joseph Goebbels aboard the Death Star that was Nazi Germany taught the same lesson in what we’ve since come to know and love under the headings of aggressive marketing and corporate knowledge management. The propaganda minister understood that arguments must me crude and emotional, instinctual rather than intellectual, endlessly repeated. The electronic media do the work on their own strategic initiative, and without the guidance and supervision once provided by the Gestapo our written language over the last thirty-odd years has been made to fill the available time slots and fit the preferred camera angles-downsized and prioritized (also attrited, deconflicted, embedded, and lifestyled) in accordance with the key performance indicators that validate delivery strategies responsive to customer needs for enjoyable and educational experiences. Refreshingly meaningless, the phrases might as well be made of asparagus or ravioli, served by the assistant food and beverage directors of the national media to discriminating diners who prefer spectacle to politics. The language facilitates the transformation of a democratic republic into a military empire, moving on from a world in which words once were held accountable for their meanings, to a land of make-believe, securely defended, as is customary with empires, by “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.”