Captain PMS / 09/19

Captain’s Blog Stardate 09/22

It’s always interesting to me when I read something written by people who actually know what Nazi Germany was like. A while back there was this bit on the Daily Show that made fun of people who use Hitler as a reference to much. They showed several clips from different speeches that all contained someone comparing someone else to Hitler or our government to the Nazis. Over and over they would show these famous, and sometimes not-so-famous, people saying things like, (and I do mean “like” I don’t have a real quote here, please don’t confuse my propaganda for reality) “Congress’s decision to overturn this bill on parking ticket restrictions is nothing short of an abuse of power not far from the kind of thing Hitler promoted…blah…blah…blah.” The point of course was that Hitler and Nazism have become so synonymous with evil that we will use them for just about anything.
It made me wonder if seventy or eighty years from now the same thing will happen with references to 9/11. Will people be linking everything to terrorism and comparing acts of minor injustice to those of the suicide bombers who brought down the World Trade Center? Then I realized, of course they will. We already are. If radio was the propaganda machine of WWII and was used to try and robocize (my own word, it’s like robot and jazzercise combined) the world, then today we have CNN, MSNBC, and of course the Fair and Balanced Fox News to attempt the same. We are desensitized already from the shocking events of 9/11 and that will only grow in time. The saturation of the media takes the importance of human tragedy away and allows us to be molded into little spending fear machines who can’t tell a real tragedy from a manufactured one.