BLUNDERBUS
by Ed Henry
4/98

Perhaps the most insidious project undertaken by the Oligarchy is that of "Operation Blunderbuss." Insidious, because it not only accomplishes its task of creating confusion, but because it also enlists the willing and unsuspecting support of the enemy or audience it's meant to effect. The very same people who are being manipulated and controlled are brought into the maze of confusion, brought into the war-room so to speak, in order to unconsciously add their talent and support to the primary objective - cover-up.

Just the other day, while driving around on my errands, I heard two local radio personalities talking about Tokyo Rose. How the Japanese woman who broadcast to our troops in the field during World War II now lived in Chicago and how they would love to interview her. How the Tokyo Rose show was something most of the young soldiers listened to because she played popular music from "the States" interspersed with propaganda comments about how their girlfriends back home were going out with other guys now that they were gone, how their parents missed them, how their leaders were taking advantage of them, and a host of other things. Everyone knew that what Rose said on the air was pure propaganda. They laughed at it. But they listened because the music was good, and they were not getting this sort of popular music entertainment anywhere else. Our side hadn't realized the value of radio music yet. Our side was broadcasting Walter Winchell and waiting for Betty Grable and the USO to show up.

This led me to think about the old master of propaganda, Joseph Goebels on the German side of the war. How he was so good at spreading propaganda it was rumored the German people thought they were winning the war until the Russians crossed their border and marched into Berlin, followed shortly by Eisenhower's troops, of course.

Then I started thinking about all the ad agencies that popped up in the fifties along with television. How these agencies sold their "creative" and "marketing" skills as a way to compete for the almighty 17 percent brokerage fee for buying millions of dollars worth of time from the networks. How they had "traffic managers" running about the agency telling researchers and creative types how much time they could spend on an account because of its billing rate. "Hey, lay off that ad, it's print media for God's sake, think about it on your lunch hour."

You don't see things like this out-in-the-open anymore. Long ago, the manufacturers got wise to advertising. Starting with those whose product was simplest, composed mostly of water or some other simple substance, like the cosmetic industry who knew they were selling a promise. They understood their product better than any hired agency working under time constraints, so they took their advertising in-house with creative boutiques plugging-in when necessary. They started using ad agencies for what they were, brokers of block time who could get you a rate, and many of the heavy advertisers began to find they could buy their own blocks of time without the additional 17 percent commission. Hard goods manufacturers, like the automotive industry, were probably the last to join these ranks simply because they spent most of their energy on tooling and engineering changes, leaving all that "advertising crap" to others down the line, at least until they all settled in on uniform design.

Anyway, I started thinking about how sophisticated we've become. How today's children, brought up on TV bombardment, have learned to "tune out" the 15 and 30 second slots that jump from subject to subject. How, to them, it's just background noise to what they're really interested in; e.g., the program, rock music, computer games and so forth. How they don't read newspapers or much of anything, how span-of-attention has become a major problem and how popular the focusing agent Ritilin has become.

Mostly, I started to think about how propaganda has gone underground. How the real masters of the art are no longer called "Ministers of Propaganda" the way Goebels was, but probably masquerade under many other titles such as "press secretaries"or "public liaisons or representatives." I began to think about the government, lawyers, and politicians, and how it's all become theater. Some of the latter performing arts being good, some not so good, and some probably very, very devious.

In the midst of these thoughts, I began to think about "Operation Blunderbuss" and how it might be working.

Long ago, when man was still a hunter, the professional food gatherers had a weapon known as a blunderbuss. It was a sort of shotgun, powder charged, with a barrel shaped like a megaphone - shaped like the old gramophone the RCA Victor dog cocked his ear towards. It was flared at the end. It was also a big gun that you could load with almost anything solid. Nuts, bolts, screws, rocks, pellets, bearings, broken glass or any cheap missile could be loaded down this barrel in great quantity.

Food gatherers would take this gun to places where ducks or geese flocked during seasons. Places like Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin. Set on a tripod, the blunderbuss would knock down geese by the hundreds. It wasn't sport, it was slaughter.

This gun threw so many missiles into the air that the geese or ducks didn't know which way to go. They didn't know which way to turn to get away. It created total confusion for the game and little chance of escape.

The primary objective of Operation Blunderbuss is to throw so many concepts and "news" missiles into the air, citizens cannot tell which direction to take, which things are important and which less important or not pertinent at all. They all seem equally deadly or equally innocuous.

Confronted with "Blunderbuss," the flock can't tell where to move. Even if they recognize the onslaught, they can't separate the wheat from the chaff, evaluate the balls in the air, or assign relative weight to any of these missiles. They all seem the same. One story after another, they all come and go in a short-lived hail of media blitz where the audience tends to treat them all as just so much fodder. The next coming of Christ would be just another story, more grist to the mill in a continuing onslaught and right next to "Mary had a little lamb" (by cloning it), got married and had an instant litter of 7 children (by using fertility drugs).

Naturally, Operation Blunderbuss has advantages to the perpetrators. Like the food gatherers of old, they need little in the way of skill or targeting. Just set the mechanism and pull the trigger. You can also hide or disguise a great many dirty deeds with this mix without much chance of being noticed or by simply not loading or allowing them to be loaded in the barrel in the first place.

We will have a lot more to say about Operation Blunderbuss in a moment. Right now, however, it's important to cover another trend that has taken place and is a definite part of this blitz.

Coming into World War II very late, after it had been going on in Europe for at least two years with the Russians pleading for a second front, it was necessary to have something dramatic to enlist the full support of the American people. After all, the United States had just emerged from about ten years of the "great depression" and was not too anxious to send its men off to war in Europe at a time when we were just getting back on our feet.

Pearl Harbor provided the necessary impetus to throw us wholeheartedly into World War II. Overnight, the American people were firmly set against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan). Hitler, Mussolini, and Hiro Hito became the anti-Christs in every American household.

Some questioned our involvement with selling Japan things it needed in its war with China before December, 7th, 1941, but no one questioned Pearl Harbor. To this day, you will be looked on with scorn if you even mention the fact that Admiral Halsey broke the three thousand year tradition of naval maneuvers by putting all his eggs in one basket; i.e., by putting the entire 7th fleet in one harbor while the Japanese attack fleet traversed four thousand miles of open ocean unnoticed.

Overnight, factories converted from peacetime to wartime production. "Rosy the Riveter" went to work in the shipyard or aircraft factory, and kids were trucked out to farms to detassle corn, pull weeds, or otherwise fill-in for farm hands gone off to war. People flattened their tin cans for recycling. Gas, groceries, nylons, cigarettes and a great many other things were rationed for the war effort. Automobile production absolutely stopped until after the war. Four years without new cars because the factories were building tanks, jeeps, and other war materials.

News, movies, radio and almost everything else was devoted to the war, its atrocities and how evil the enemy was. John Wayne, Sonny Tufts, Henry Fonda and other actors gave up their gunslinger roles to become soldiers or the pilots of smooth running powerful P-40s and P38s while the Japanese clunked along in rattling "Zeros" with evil grins and buck teeth.

Several things are important at this point:

Controversy still exists over our use of the A-Bomb when we had already pushed the Japanese back past Okinawa and they were on their knees. This is similar to being as close as Cuba is to the United States and ready for the final plunge. The reasons for the controversy are as follows:

When we entered World War II, the scientific community thought we were in a race with Germany to develop nuclear capability. Communications between scientists had been cut off, but our side knew that Werner Heisenberg was working for the Germans. Heisenberg was known to be the molecular genius of the day. He had also developed, as a very young man, Heisenberg's Principle of Discontinuity which, to the layman, was known as "the uncertainty principle." It rocked the world of scientific investigation and the quest for absolutes.

Basically, what the principle of uncertainty said was that in the world of molecular investigation the investigator himself introduced a bias. It said that the mere fact of observation, by whatever means, caused the subject under observation to react in a way that would not happen if the observer were not present. Therefore, you could never study the subject in its natural state.

Unfortunately, people like lawyers took this to mean that you could argue any subject from any angle imaginable. Sociologists took it to mean things like, you would never understand what it's like to be black unless you are black, and to push for "participant observation" studies. The latter meant that, if the sociologists were studying gangs for instance, the students would join the gangs in order to get their information and, if they were caught or arrested, the university would disavow any complicity Mission Impossible style.

Once the war was over, once communications between scientists was re-established, in the spring of 1945 and before we pushed Japan all the way across the Pacific, our scientists found out that there had been no race with Germany after all. They found that Heisenberg had told Hitler, long ago, that the atom could not be split - that the bomb could not be built. Hitler believed him and there was no nuclear development in Germany.

It was this possibly humanitarian and conscientious act by Heisenberg that caused about half of the Manhattan Project people to plead with Truman not to drop the bomb. Unfortunately, by that time the bomb was already in the hands of the military and the military wanted to test its effects on cities and people. They knew it would cause a tidal wave if dropped in the ocean anywhere close to the island of Japan. They knew it would obliterate Mount Fuji if they dropped it down the throat of this volcano and possibly irreparably damage the earth. But that wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to observe its effect on cities and people. Participant observation again, right? After all, what's the sense of having a weapon if you aren't going to use it on the enemy?

August 6, 1945, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. On August 9, three days later and before the Japanese could recover enough to even put together an unconditional surrender, we dropped another on Nagasaki. The military even claimed that if we had had more, as many as a dozen of these bombs, we would have dropped them all on Japanese cities.

To this day, it's still debatable whether the Russians, a nation of three or four times the land mass but half the population of the United States, wasn't forced into the "Cold War" as a means of keeping the U.S. in check or at bay. To this day, no one wants to touch this possibility. Oh well, we're the good guys, aren't we?

One thing we did learn from World War II was that it really didn't pay to completely defeat an enemy. Once defeated, you had to occupy their territory and you were put in the position of protecting them. Denied armed forces, it's up to the victors to keep their enemies away and protect their economic interest from others who would simple take their oil supplies and so forth. (Most of the oil from "the gulf" goes to Japan, while the U.S. gets most of its oil from Venesuela and Mexico)

What's more, not having to support a Pentagon, these defeated nations develop commercial industries and become very competitive on that front. In some ways you might say that Japan lost the war but won the American market with electronics, cars, banks, and other strategic forces. Not having to serve in the military, all the young men and women put their energies elsewhere. And they certainly were not spending billions on defense or a Pentagon the way we do.

Turned out that the Japanese were very good at developing "team spirit" within their factories and employee ranks. We're still trying to emulate their success with "team building" lessons and techniques, and do so without the culture to back it up.

At any rate, we began having "police actions" first in Korea and later in Viet Nam. In the first instance, Korea, we pulled MacArthur back to Washington and actually relieved him of duty because he wanted to push on once he had the North Koreans on the run. He wanted to run the communist North Koreans all the way into China and take the whole country. Generals needed to be taught the economics of war.

In Viet Nam, a highly controversial military action to begin with, we actually lost a war (excuse me, a police action) because all the technical proficiency in the world isn't much good in the guerilla warfare arena (still our Achilles heal). On top of that, we had veterans of this action returning home to the States only to find that their sacrifices were not much appreciated and even some of their staunchest U.S. leaders, like former Secretary of State Robert McNamara, claiming that we shouldn't have been there at all.

Nowadays, we have police actions that last only a moment in the time continuum of warfare and some, like Haiti, where a shot isn't even fired. Add in the Falklands, Panama City invasion, or Granada (win one for the gipper), Iran, Iraq and others. Mostly, we seem to be interfering in religious disputes or civil wars in places few have even heard of. Other places, like Nicaragua, we send in our espionage agents to provoke action, but end up backing off in the face of obvious disinterest or corruption in our own ranks. Yet, some of the "heroes" of these ridiculous skirmishes go on to fame and fortune and even, like Ollie North, run for public office or get their own talk radio shows where they can continue to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk of heroism.

Theater has always been a military term. However, it was once used to describe something real and other than the silver screen, boob-tube, or platform/stage of political life that it is today. We used to have reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow. Now we have Wolf Blitzer, Bobby Batista and Christiana Amanpour.

The cold war was another where we knew exactly who the enemy was - it was communism. Commies were bad guys. Commies lived only to destroy us. Commies didn't believe in God. Commies were evil. Commies were infiltrating our country, our unions, our movie business, even our government. Commies were everywhere. Commies were doing things we would never dream of doing. No wonder Russia had half the population of the U.S., they were all over here trying to subvert and convert us. You couldn't be sure your own mother wasn't a communist, especially when she started talking about social or welfare things such as the communist organized CIO (later to become the AFofL/CIO, and finally just the AFL).

For more than forty years, the United States was able to keep all of its military contractors busy building bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, fighters, bombers, ships, spy devices, and other necessary equipment. We even had a "star wars" project to find some way of defending the entire nation against incoming missiles. And this idea isn't dead yet, although they're now trying to revive it to protect us from meteor showers or the Chinese.

Did you know that more than 1,300 meteors hit the earth every year? The prolific writer, Isaac Asimov, wrote a technical book about it years ago. Of course, most meterorites "burn-up" or are obliterated in the atmosphere and are what we see as "shooting stars." Our moon sweeps many others up. But a bunch of them reach the surface of the earth. Mostly small as coins, they've fallen in the oceans or otherwise managed to miss people for millions of years (except in today's commercials for car repair). You can be almost certain someone will die from such a cause shortly so we can get rolling on the star-wars project again. Maybe that's what hit Vince Foster or Ron Brown's plane.

At any rate, for more than forty years the Russians had missiles pointed at us and we had just as many, if not more, pointed at them. Anytime they developed something we didn't have there were cries of a "Missile Gap" and we would pour tons of money into getting ahead again.

We had early warning "Dew Line" sites all over the world, B-52s airborne and on constant patrol with "fail-safe" points, and movies about it like "Dr. Strangelove" (not meant to depict Henry Kissinger, of course). We had neighborhood launch sites and even some on trucks to move around the country on the idea they couldn't be targeted, providing the main reason for the interstate highway system. Some people had bomb and fallout shelters, provisions, and all sorts of crazy plans to survive the holocaust.

Cities and States had commissions working on evacuation procedures. The top floor of the Science and Industry building was devoted to studying ways to get all of the people out of Chicago in the event of a nuclear attack. Every once in awhile we'd get a report about how it "couldn't be done in time."

We even had a "Space-Race" and "Space Gap" with the Russians where it was crucial we get to the moon and develop satellites before they did. If we didn't walk on the moon, plant our flag there, and prove it wasn't made of cheese before they did, there would be disaster. Now we're working with them to build a space station. Go figure.

Some of the commie stories didn't make much sense. Before we called it "Foreign Aid," I remember my father talking about how senseless our "Lend-Lease Program" was. He said that we would give a country like India millions if they would use it to buy tractors from Caterpillar or International Harvester. Then there would be all these tractors sitting in India rusting because no one over there knew how to run or take care of them. Manuals were in English.

The Russians, on the other hand, would go in with rakes and hoes and show people how to plant food. Later we developed the "Peace Corps" which seems devoted to doing exactly the sort of things the Commies did. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Uncle Ray came back from WWII after serving in Patton's army. He told stories about how "smelly" the Russians were. How disheveled and unwashed they were. When he encountered them in Germany, they were what he called: "a pact of rabble you wouldn't want to know. Filled with stories by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, of Russian ballet and other arts, I found some of this a little difficult to believe.

Most American troops seemed to have little appreciation or understanding of what the Russians had been through. Pushed deeply into their own country long before we even entered the war, the Russians had burned their own cities, villages and farms behind them as they retreated to starve the enemy of supplies. Such tactics had worked against Napoleon, but this time the Germans could truck and fly in supplies from the fatherland and all of the European countries they already held. Then, once the tide was turned, the Russians pushed the Germans back over their own scorched territory. After 7 years of war on the Eastern Front by themselves, and this sort of ground fighting, it was small wonder the Russians seemed "disheveled" and "unwashed."

Operation Blunderbuss blossomed in the Reagan years and carries into the present. It was necessary in order to disguise the fact that the federal government was putting the nation deeply in debt (much worse than Reagan left the State of California) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It was also the time when, in 1983, the Greenspan Commission found a way to rob trust funds of billions of dollars. Blunderbuss started innocently enough, but quickly became one of the most effective means of confusing the public ever invented.

It started with stories about "trickle-down economics" and cutting the size of government. Promoted stories about Reagan as "the great communicator" with lots of shots of reporters shouting questions over the thump of helicopter blades as he and Nancy took off for Camp David or some other vital location. There were also speeches where the President mentioned how he had just talked to some little girl in Del Rio, Texas whose mother worked hard on long shifts at the Pink-Pleasant-Plastic-Baby-Jesus factory, and how she felt about the subject at hand. The country ate it up.

The media responded with more and more of this as bank failures and S&L bailouts costing over $400 billion were everywhere. Vice President Bush's oldest son Neil was right in the thick of it with his Colorado "Silverado" S&L. There was the Communist infiltration of Central America, nuns being shot in El Salvador, Guatamala's gun running, and Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" all playing right into the mix. None of this was given more play than Nancy's wanting to get rid of Donald Regan or the "Just Say No" campaign. The White House threw parties for the Queen of England (home of the Beatles, the BGs, and much of popular Rock) and had The Captain & Tennille sing "Muskrat Ramble." There was constant palaver about how great the economy was doing.

Everyone loved the image of Ronald Reagan as everybody's father or grandfather. He proved that he didn't understand "modern music," right? Even if he stuttered once in awhile, drooled, or fell asleep in meetings or eating Chinese food, it just added to the image and made him human, more grandfatherly. Next to George Schultz, our Chris Kringle Secretary of State, Reagan seemed like a speed talker. And the economy truly was doing great. How could it not? The federal government was borrowing and running deficits to the hilt.

On a much grander scale, the average American's feelings of prosperity were not dissimilar to the appreciation the people of New Orleans felt towards the pirate Jean LaFitte when he headquartered in the bayous of southern Louisiana. Business was great.

Even Mexico's greatest story, the Pemex scandal, another instance of supposed Bush owned Texas company involvement, passed completely unnoticed by the American press. Buried under stories about how "it's the economy, stupid." The American public was obviously overjoyed with their situation. Nobody worried. Everyone thought they were getting rich. Boomers became republicans.

Eventually, we ran Russia into bankruptcy. No one ever asked how a nation with so few people was even able to compete for 40 years.

All of this was small potatoes in the Blunderbuss build-up. Today, we've developed the true Blunderbuss load:

Weapons of mass destruction * Killer bees * China-gate * contrails * Iraq * Gulf War syndrome * Travel-gate * DNA * analytical assessments * $800 toilet seats * UN debt * Ruby Ridge * Santa Ana Winds * Habitat for Humanity * CIA & crack cocaine * USS Vincennes shoots down airliner * Barry Sheck * 800 new pages for IRS * Farms Auctioned * Haitian refugees * National Debt * Discrimination * Riots in L.A. * Princess Diana * General Schwartzkoff * Bomb Iran * TWA Flight 800 * Paula Jones * Kukes, Albania * Billy Beer * Senator Packwood * Gary Hart * Oil tankers attacked in Gulf * Emille Jonissant * Hinckley shoots Reagan * World Trade Center bombed * School Guns * Palestinians * Syria * Army buys $300 hammers * Gun Control * Mena Airport * Y2K * No more big government * Vince Foster dies * File-Gate * Hillary to run for Senate * Omar Khadafi * Lockerby Pan Am Flight 103 * Equal Rights * Save Social Security * Aerobics * Ken Starr's Commission * abolish Commerce Department * Ron Brown dies * Italian Ski-lift taken out * Libya * IMF bailout * slaughter in Kenya * Budget Surplus * Cartels * Sheppard killed * Dow hits 10,000 * Gianni Versache * Aids epidemic * War in Saudi Arabia * Floods * Michael Jordan plays baseball * minus ½ hr invasion of Haiti * boys dead on tracks by Mena Airport for not saying "no" * Susan McDougall imprisoned * kill Sadaam Hussein * kill Castro * Golan Heights * Helms-Burton Act * Canada's response to Helms-Burton * Court TV * Pope visits Cuba * Magic Johnson has aids * George W. Bush elected Gov. of Texas * Jeb Bush becomes Gov. of Florida * Nepotism rampant in government * Nepotism rampant in Hollywood * Federal Bldg. Bombed in Oklahoma City * Texas black man dragged to death chained to pick-up * Monica Lewinsky * E-Coli * U.S. bombs Baghdad, again * Earthquakes * FBI files in White House * Craig Livingstone disappears * Newt Gingrich resigns * WACO (we ain't comin out) * Bob Livingston Resigns * Mother Theresa dies * Bob Dole Commercials * Tailgate * Clinton sells secrets to China * Hostages * White Water * Tyson Foods in Little Rock * World Government * James Carville Commercials * UN press gangs * the Legionnaire's disease * Contract With America * Larry Flynt * breast cancer * welfare reform * gay rights * children divorce parents * SCUD missiles * Gun Control * Socialists * Kennebunkport * Blue Thunder * sexual harassment * Sandinistas * Stealth Bombers * Barry Seals shot at Arkansas courthouse * Tobacco lawsuits * Uni-Bomber caught * Freeman Militia stand-off * David Duke and the KKK * Hot-Bot suicides * Gulags * Global Warming * Tanker Valdez oil spill * Hurricanes * Raves * N.Y. garbage * O.J. Simpson trial * Spotted Owl endangered * Black Helicopters * Corporate takeovers * Gays in the military * Biological Weapons * Motor Voter Act * Pakistan tests bomb * Altheimers disease * Louis Farakhan and the Million Man March * Corporate Takeovers * Fawn Hall shreds and stuffs * missing Watergate files show up on White House table * Tailgate * Freedom Fighters * Marijuana Laws * Free Mandela * Cuban Embargo * attention deficit disorder * CNN and Time-Warner merge * Pentagon reorders uniforms when warehouses bulging already * Gun Control * Disabilities Act * Ollie North spouts patriotism, in uniform * Reverend Moon * Supersonic Transports * ATF ¨ India tests bomb * GATT treaties * Euro Dollars * Dutch Elm disease * Launch Pads in Florida Keys * Contra connections * Tuna Biting Off New Jersey Coast * Salmonella * Apartheid * nepotism in Hollywood * Disney buys ABC * women bear liters * nuclear subs * Delta Forces * Tri-Lateral Commission * Jesse Ventura becomes Gov. of Minnesota * baby boomers * surgical precision bombing * Jon Binet * Gore takes contributions from Buddhist monks/nuns * World Banking * Off-Shore Oil * ex-Cubans shot down by Cuban MIGs * Admiral Poindexter * West Bank * Mr. Gorbachev, take down that wall * Steve Forbes runs * organ banks * Ross Perot runs * Ross Perot re-runs * by-pass surgery * capital gains * fertility drugs * Handicap Rights * nuclear proliferation * Council on Foreign Relations * Apartheid * Drug War * cholesterol * NYC excrement dumps in Texas * Threatened Default * Bosnia * World Wide Web * Koffi Anon * Rose Law Firm Shreds * Libya * Karate * Lotto * Shades of Strangelove * Branch Davidians * NAFTA * same-sex marriages * Terrorists * It Takes A Village * Hillary in Helsinki w/David's Mother * Samosa * Tibet * Militia Movements * Aids Contaminated Arkansas Prison Blood to Canada * Greenpeace * Johnny Cochran plays race card * Viagara * Campaign Finance Reform * estrogen replacement * Rwanda embargo * Most Favored Nation Status * Dumbing of America * Bildebergers * HMS Queen Elizabeth 2 * black market organs * Greenhouse Effect * Medical Marijuana * Au-Pair Trial * Army practices night raids in U.S. cities * Dali Lama * Tobacco suits * Marion Barry * Corporate mergers * Government Closure * Dark Alliance * Gulf War II * Israel * crack babies * Save the Whales * Nuclear Disarmament * World Banking * Designated Smoke Areas * Giant Sucking Sound * Flat Tax * Casinos * Baseball Strike * Jim McDougal dies * Military sexual misconduct * Kosovo * Impeachment * Troops still in Bosnia * Rules of Engagement * Noriega * Democrats & Republicans as Cults * Tianenmen Square * Gore Invents Internet * various Photo Ops * Know your customers * Refugees in Guantanamo * Slobodan Milosevic * Aristide * Microsoft suit * Mothballed ships & planes and the need to build bigger/better ones * Polls * Finding & Raising the Titanic * Basketball Lockout * Balanced Budget Act * Support Taiwan * Henry Hyde's Committee * Focused Groups * Genocide * Ethnic Cleansing * Re-inventing Government * Spin * Hong Kong taken by China * White House Bed & Breakfast * National IDs * Internet * Save the Children

You can count on one hand the stories that stayed alive more than a few days, one or two weeks at best. Once the smoke clears, all disappears. Few are remembered. Programs like X-Files have more continuity than news and events, and more popularity even though they still can't afford lighting.

The most remembered is usually the more recent, and they all fade from memory in a short period of time. Probably one of the biggest tales was the Monica Lewinsky-Jones-Clinton-fornigate and impeachment story. It lasted so long, and bored people so much with trivial detail that everyone was anxious to return to normal Blunderbuss. Now, just a few months later, it's almost forgotten.

This is the value of Blunderbuss. Whenever something breaks, even if it's life threatening, it will be received and treated as just another story, almost another fairy tale. What's that got to do with me? Shortly it fades into the background of static and other noises, and all is forgotten or forgiven. Who, in their right minds, would want to go through another "Impeachment Trial?" Even if it was for treason.

Conversely, if you've committed a great many crimes, things are beginning to close in on you, and you have the power to do it - pick the least offensive one and throw it into the hopper. If it's one where you can count on more than half the men in the country, or all of the drugstore cowboys sympathizing with your involvement, help it blossom. Create leaks. Encourage investigation while claiming innocence. If it's also one where many of the women in the country side with you because you've done them favors and they've forgotten the story of Little Red Riding Hood or the fox in the hen-house, or they just believe "that's the way men are" or "it's the drink talking," help get the ball rolling. It's called setting up a straw man or straw horse. In today's world you can defeat it with good lawyers (who believe they can argue anything) and you completely avoid the real issues. Everyone will be glad when it's settled. And they'll never want to hear another story like that again, ever. Don't worry, there are plenty of other tales.

Major issues, like our eroding Constitution, the National Debt, outright theft of Trust Fund money (Social Security) and meaningful Campaign Finance Reform that would dethrone the Oligarchy - are lost in the morass of Blunderbuss. They're buried and disguised by Blunderbuss. Even if they show up briefly, they're just other stories. Even this is just another article to read and forget. More grist to the mill. Why worry?

Most of this web site is devoted to the national debt and trust fund rip-offs in the trillions. Who cares?

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