Or How I Learned That the Occupy Protesters are Conservatives and Fox News is a Marxist Cult
  

Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!

- Bizarro Code

Between protests breaking out in about a thousand cities and Congress currently being marginally more popular than Small Pox, one may be wondering just what is going on in the world today. Well, it turns out that we are at war now. No, I'm not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Libya. This is a war of the worlds. After decades of scattered clashes of attrition, proxy skirmishes and minor confrontations, Bizarro World has finally officially declared war on the earthlings.

 

Let me explain. A little over a month ago, after being called a "left wing nutbar" by a pundit on CBC, journalist Chris Hedges affirmed his support for the Occupy protests, as indignant jaws fell to the floor in disbelief.

I would say that those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are the true conservatives because they’re calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism.

Chris Hedges -  interviewed on CBC’s “Lang & O’Leary Exchange” - 10/9/2011

At first glance, this might seem like a topsy-turvy way of looking at the situation, but upon further examination something does seem to be conspicuously missing from our current mainstream definition of conservatism -- namely, a single shred of anything even remotely conservative.

 

A look back at conservatism in the United States reveals a mentality that made few distinctions between chattel slavery and wage slavery, a dwindling group of statespersons who denounced on principle court decisions like Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific to grant corporations personhood and finally "trust busters" like Teddy Roosevelt who aggressively attacked large corporations to curb their power and influence.

 

As for the trusts themselves, their policies (in what can only be described as a hilarious 'fuck you' to over a hundred years of American tradition) are now pronounced to be the essence of conservatism: the removal of the Bretton Woods system, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the decision of Citizens United. Corporations are people and that's all there is to it: immortal, unaccountable, pathological people with superpowers. The record of corporate politics is also somewhat spotty, including a failed fascist coup in 1933 to overthrow the United States government and a more successful conspiracy to dismantle American public transit. A silly earthling, unversed in the Bizarro culture, might even describe these tactics as revolutionary.

 

But if these policies are actually Bizarro World conservatism, what should we call them here on earth? Noam Chomsky offers an interesting perspective.

We have a highly class-conscious business class. They are deeply imbued with Marxist conceptions, they are vulgar Marxists, fighting a bitter class war - albeit on the other side, but that's their conception: That you have to 'control the mass of the population, with concepts that will be self-destructive for them, and beneficial to us'

 Noam Chomsky -  interviewed  by "Citizen Radio" - 11/2/2009

Vulgar Marxism is a theory stating that the economic base determines the superstructure of all social, cultural, political and intellectual consciousness. If there has ever been a concise and accurate description of the current state of mass media and their prevailing doctrine, this would be it.

As one coup failed, another succeeded. Corporate power is now locked firmly to state power in what some political scientists call the

“iron triangle.” A few enormous conglomerates (whittled down to only four or five over the last few decades) also own and control virtually every mass medium in the United States, with the exception of the internet. The courts have ruled unambiguously that these corporations have no responsibility to uphold a public trust, in exchange for the protected and exclusive privilege of broadcasting on public airwaves, and are entitled to political speech at their discretion. Media corporations now have protected rights to distort and even lie, with no public recourse. These rights are exercised daily, without any riot squads storming corporate headquarters and screaming at employees to disperse while showering them with caustic dispersants.

  

 

 

Commercial television in particular emerged out of Public Relations. This is another funny concept we have to decypher. Public Relations is another name Edward Bernays, the field’s founding father, (in his own words) made up for propaganda after World War I Germany managed to made that word 'unpopular.' The content on television is the advertising (a subset of the Public Relations industry), the filler is the stuff in between like news and entertainment -- and, unfortunately, the viewers are the product being sold.

 

The birth of Fox News was well in line with this tradition of undermining markets by convincing people to make uninformed and wildly irrational decisions, but spurred on by the idea that network television filler was simply woefully neglected --  it just wasn't ideological enough. According to a Nixon-era memo by Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News Channel, the ultimate purpose of his plan was to generate "pro-Administration" content, because "people are lazy [and] with television [...] the thinking is done for you."

The ideological task layed before the acolytes of this Marxist religion in campaigning for the business class  was a tricky one. They had to convince people that government is awful and malevolent when it works for them, and yet wonderful and necessary when it works for corporations. As contradictory as it sounded, the task was to make people simultaneously want both less and more government. 

 

On one hand, the rabble had to understand that they needed strict, unyielding free market discipline as it applies to them and their children. On the other, they ought to support rabid 'socialism' as it applies to those whom their children will (hopefully) end up renting themselves to for the rest of their lives and/or until the oceans swell and turn to battery acid. 

To an earthling this might seem like an insurmountable challenge, but in Bizarro World up is down and contradictions are welcomed. For example, when those whom the courts define as "natural persons" fall into the depths of a growing chasm in wealth disparity, this is "class warfare" -- the tyranny of the lazy over the hard working Job Creators. In Bizarro World, when people experience soaring corporate profits over 30 years of declining workers' share of national income, plumetting real wages,  a rapid growth of household debt, a thirty years declining personal savings rate and skyrocketing unemployment with record numbers of jobs exported abroad, this is "redistribution of wealth" -- but down, rather than up. You see, up is what we would call it here on earth. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, in Bizarro World, we are always on the verge of victory against a phantom menace, yet the threat is so grave that we cannot let up -- a concept that applies both at home and abroad.

In Bizarro World, we're surrounded by liberal media, always pushing their sinister socialist agenda. We can describe their tactics. For instance, when protests started in New York and NPR, having spent the previous week breaking hard-hitting stories on the air about shopping-mall "flash-mobs gone bad" (large groups of teenage pranksters spontaneously 'swarming' unlikely public gatherings for a laugh) and "a dozen teachers [paddling] canoes out onto Black Walnut Creek," unexpectedly raised their standards for newsworthy material and decided that over a thousand people waving signs and rapidly growing in numbers was not a phenomenon particularly deserving of any airtime. Ten days later, after over 80 arrests, involving the NYPD indiscriminately crop-dusting crowds of protesters with mace under no discernible provocation, executive editor Dick Meyer finally responded to the criticism accusing NPR of an on-air blackout by explaining that "the recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective." The radical, socialist journal called the New York Times responded to the surge of protests on the sixth day (when a "largely African American crowd of about 2000" marched from Union Square to Wall Street to protest the execution of Troy Davis) with scathing mockery and a picture of an awkward-looking ramshackle marching band of a few white teenagers beating on makeshift drums made out of plastic buckets and the arm of a mannequin. These are the left-wing extremists,  cheering on their pinko revolutionary movement.

In Bizarro World, a discarded kitchen knife represents a cache of dangerous weapons, presumably from a foiled, would-be terrorist plot, and military-grade pepper spray, doused over the faces of a dozen quiet adolescents sitting down and holding hands, is "a food product, essentially" -- so why the fuss? What are the Bizarro-folk to do except hope that the government they hate-love can hold back the hordes of crack-addicted, lazy, rapist barbarians rapping at their door?

 

Brace yourselves. Bizarro World draws near. 

 

Edit  11/27/11: reworded to avoid confusing Republicans and conservatives