Swift wrote:Rommie wrote: One of the interesting things he said was what amazed him about the US is unlike in the communist days in the USSR the propaganda in the US is far more effective- no one believed propaganda in the commie days but now so many Americans genuinely do.
I can't speak to the USSR, but the people in the US that believe this tripe want to believe in this tripe.
For example, it is much more comforting to God-fearing good Christians to believe that the people in the US going to bed hungry at night are worthless, lazy, dope-smoking n-words who would rather collect welfare (steal money from real people) then work any of the good, character building jobs that are sitting waiting for them. That is a much more comforting image than the children of the working poor, who's parents can only find very-part-time jobs at McD's and Burger King, work two of those jobs, but still can't keep food on the table until the end of the month.
This comes to mind:
Kurt Vonnegut wrote:Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.
The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my one-time hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.
My stolen answer to Nixon was this: "Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir."
I miss Vonnegut- like mike, he would've had so many good observations on current politics.