I'm Old Enough to Remember When They Were Panicking About the Young

American Bandstand was on the teevee every afternoon; it was, all by itself, creating a generation of Juvenile Delinquents!

Damb, I'm old enough to remember JDs and DA haircuts and all the panic and fear that was being raised in the media practically every day about young folks running wild.

Now, of course, fear and panic are being ginned up about the Old Folks* getting older, retiring, and sucking up all the Good that should be going to the young, or if not to them, at least to someone more deserving.

This propaganda campaign against the Old Farts and their nasty pensions and their over-abundant Social Security and their icky illnesses has been going on for years nonstop, relentlessly, pretty much daily in all the major media -- and in a lot of the new media, too. The propaganda has been ratcheted up recently, what with the Doom of the Fiscal Cliff and the Disaster of the Debt Limit to keep the pot stirred and the panic at a fever pitch. The Old, the Sick, the Halt and the Lame cost too much. We cannot sustain the expense! We must Do Something NOW!!!!

Yes, well... isn't that always the case?

Actually, what's really going on is that the rich people who have been getting massively richer over the past few decades of tax cuts, corporate welfare, wars of aggression, lifestyle subsidies, bankster bailouts and what have you, see that in the near term future -- if something isn't done! -- they will have to pay some of their ill-gotten gains back to the public treasury, and they are adamant about refusing to do so, especially if it means that even a dime of revenue from them goes to pay for some geezer in a nursing home. They. Will. Not. Pay. Period. End of discussion.

They will not pay. So far, no one dares to go up against them mano a mano. And there is absolutely no one among them who will break ranks and say for the record that those who have benefited the most from the economic policies that are producing so much disaster for so many have an obligation and a responsibility to anyone beyond their own circle and those they choose to assist. There is no sense of the overall Public Interest whatsoever. It's been abandoned completely.

All they want is to ensure that those pitchforks, torches, tumbrils and guillotines they keep hearing about from their spies among the rabble are kept at bay.

They will pay, in other words, for a massive and quite mad National Security State which can and does project its power globally. That is worth it to them. But almost nothing else is. Well, that and whatever bailouts and welfare they can suck up. Priorities, after all.

Generally, all the relentless propaganda that accuses the old of living too long and costing too much is little more than projection. Isn't it really the rich and their running dogs that live too long and cost too much? Do we even have to debate this? Look on your teevee any Sunday, and you'll see exactly what's meant: all these cranky, rich, and often elderly mouthpieces yammering endlessly about how other old folks are taking all the Good, and of course threatening the very existence of the Republic in the process.

We should know the truth: those who complain the loudest on the teevee (and in the rest of the media) are typically the ones who are living the longest and costing the rest of us the most.

The only thing they really want -- and will pay for -- is the ability to suppress, repress, and oppress the seething multitudes. Propaganda works wonders in preparing the battle space as they say, and we have been drowning in anti-old-fart propaganda for years.

It's tracking closely with the Anti-Iraq (mutated now into Anti-Iran) propaganda that led to the Mesopotamian debacle of unpleasant memory. Hm, it appears Our Betters are not only innately stupid, they are incapable of learning.  Well, I shouldn't say that. They do learn -- in the sense of learning how better to manipulate and suppress dissent -- but they don't learn the lessons they need to about how to live in the world.

The way to deal with this nonsense is to recognize the propaganda and immunize oneself and one another against it, to state clearly and relentlessly what needs to be done, and to accept nothing at face value from the media or the institutions that supposedly serve the Public Interest.

Recognize the lies.

Resist.

Build a better future.

[Meant to say that today's Old Farts are the same people as the JDs and the Hippies of yore. In other words, the panic and fear has been a factor of the Boomer generation from the beginning...]