"Far more insidious and less open to conscious challenge are the notions that so fit into the dominant political culture's field of established images that they appear not as biased manipulations but as 'the nature of things.'"
--Parenti, Inventing Reality
That's a pretty concise description of things, I'd say.
"The third world is not poor. You don't go to poor countries to make money. Most countries are rich. Only the people are poor. Ordinary people pay the costs of empire. These countries are not underdeveloped, they are over exploited." Michael Parenti
maybe because im from there, but to me this is the best
Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about "left intellectuals" who try to "rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements" and "then beat the people into submission.... You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy You see later that power doesn't lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We're seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans" {Z Magazine, 10/95). Chomsky's imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of "communist thugs" who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger.
Has Parenti ever talked about how Chomsky seems to have basically plagiarized his book?
It's pretty common for great minds to come up with roughly the same idea at roughly the same time. Look at Deep Impact and Armageddon.
My hottest Armageddon take is that this part of the plot actually makes sense.
It's premised on two points:
- They only spot the asteroid two weeks before it will hit Earth, and
- They establish that (in-universe, at least, no clue about reality) drilling the type of hole they want to drill is Really Fucking Complicated. It's so complicated that even the drilling experts (Bruce Willis et al.) struggle with the task when they reach the asteroid.
Now you can't train anyone to do anything Real Fucking Complicated in two weeks, and you wouldn't want to send someone up there who isn't a genuine expert in the task when the whole world is at stake. Of course, flying space shuttles is also Real Fucking Complicated. But they don't train Bruce Willis to fly, they only teach him and his crew how to maneuver in space suits and drive the space buggy (that has a machine gun on it for some reason). All they have to do is survive the journey up there until it's time to drill. The real astronauts fly everyone to the asteroid and do the Real Fucking Complicated space stuff, but then the oil well crew handles the Real Fucking Complicated task of precision drilling through unknown geology.
This division of labor comes in handy, too, when they land off course and have to drill through a much more difficult patch of the asteroid than they originally expected. Had they given actual astronauts some half-assed crash course in drilling, they and the whole planet would have been fucked. It made all the sense in the world to have your best space shuttle pilots pilot the space shuttle and your best hole drillers drilling the hole.
"Can you all hear me back there? This microphone doesn't seem to be working."- Michael Parenti, every speech he's ever done
