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By Jason Miller

9/11/07

“The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”

Excellence indeed. Few would deny that Oprah Winfrey has achieved an extraordinary degree of THAT, at least by our society’s warped standards. Witty, articulate, attractive, beloved by tens of millions, and fabulously wealthy, she is the “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” queen of a vast media empire. Oprah is a living embodiment of the American Dream. What is perhaps most inspiring to her genuflecting disciples is that Oprah rose to her stratospheric position of wealth and influence from an impoverished start in a socioeconomic hierarchy still largely dominated by white males.

Oprah Winfrey ostensibly possesses the mythical Midas Touch, a generous spirit, deep spiritual wisdom, and, in the eyes of those blinded by their adoration, the credentials of a saint. Yet despite appearing destined for canonization, Oprah injects heavy doses of infectious pus into the already deeply abscessed wound of the American psyche.

How could anyone who’s noted for having said, “Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine,” have such a pernicious effect on our culture?

Let’s “count the ways…with a passion put to use.”

To truly understand the depth of the damage Oprah inflicts on our society, we need to step outside of our bourgeois indoctrination and see her for what she truly represents. Manifesting the Horatio Alger Myth on steroids, Oprah is a wet dream come true for our criminal class of ruling elites sometimes referred to as the plutocracy. She provides them with “irrefutable” and ubiquitous anecdotal evidence which “proves” the idiotic delusion that America is a meritocracy where everyone has a realistic chance of getting rich, if they just work hard enough. The reality is that the richest 20% of US Americans own over 80% of the wealth and the long-term trend has been toward an ever increasing concentration of treasure into a smaller number of strong-boxes(1).

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“More cruel and more angry, and more addicted to the illusory benefits of a technology that actually has created a dependency on mechanical solutions to even basic problems, and has generated a psychic prison of adumbrated personal choice. When Bush says “they” hate us because of our freedoms, the hidden meaning is that there is a fear “they” will someday have to suffer these same *freedoms*.”

By John Steppling

9/8/07

You know, one of the things that has been interesting about our long dialogue here is that you are *there* and I am *not*. I forget, I think, what it must be like to live in the middle of the madness, of the vast necropolis of the mighty empire. Someone asked me recently if I didn’t miss the US, and in particular Los Angeles (my birthplace). I thought about it and said, “no, I don’t”. And it’s true, I don’t. I miss small things of the culture; Mexican food, good Bar B Q, and of course a lot of my old friends. But I DO NOT miss anything else. Burroughs once said, many many years ago, that whenever he left the US he felt a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

The sense of constant selling is overwhelming. My last visit to the States was several years ago, and the most vivid impression I had was of a populace addicted to buying what they don’t need, arrogance, intellectual hypertrophy, and obesity. The other most vivid impression was that of American television. Let me post this link to Scott Ritter’s latest:

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By Jason Miller

8/27/07

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”

–Malcolm X

Striving with the unwavering dedication of true believers and slaves to the grind, those of us who exist within the geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries of the United States are collectively destroying the Earth.

With dutiful efforts, heavily sedated consciences, and sweet obliviousness to the depth of our depravity, we toil away at our chosen or assigned tasks. After all, predatory plutocrats like “Mitt” Romney would be impotent without his minions—the hundreds of millions of wage slaves exercising their “right to work” (for as small a wage as they desire) while obediently manning the bulwarks of a system so putrid that were it possible to feed it to a pig, our porcine friend would wretch his guts out.

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By Joe Bageant

8/24/07

On televisions you see police cars surround the car of a “terror suspect.” … When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf. … So maybe you’ll just ignore what your brain was trying to say, which is that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers. … But the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can’t quite get rid of. … But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the discussion zooms ahead. Why can’t everyone else see it?

—Jennifer, in Los Angeles

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing his wife and baby up for Allah.

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today’s system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things — the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.

All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind’s interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.

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by Vi Ransel

8/24/07

Sisyphus, a Corinthian king
of Greek mythology,
was condemned by Olympian gods
to pay a heavy price for his greed

by rolling an enormous stone
to the peak of a steep hill’s crown,
and every time he’d reach the top,
the stone quickly rolled back down.

* * * * * *

Throughout the Dark Ages of Europe
the mass of the medieval population
became the virtual slaves of the Rich
through the process of feudalization.

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By Vi Ransel

8/23/07

While the game is rigged
in favor of the Rich,
they still depend
on us
to spend enough
to support them in the style
to which we’ve allowed them
to become accustomed.

When we turn around
and make a gift to them
of the wages
we slave so hard to make
by exchanging them
for mindless consumer fluff
we’re saying that it’s OK

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Wikipedia on Public Relations: “One of Bernays’ early clients was the tobacco industry. In 1929, he orchestrated a legendary publicity stunt aimed at persuading women to take up cigarette smoking, which was then considered unfeminine and inappropriate for women with any social standing. He initially consulted with psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who told him that cigarettes were symbolic of the male penis. Therefore, if one wanted women to take up the habit of it was necessary to first connect the act of smoking to the idea of challenging the established male power in society. Women would smoke, he said, if the cigarette was a statement against the male-dominant ways, because this way women would symbolically have their own penises.”

By Ramzy Baroud

8/18/07

It was Edward Bernays who fine-tuned the art of Public Relations in the twentieth century. Using many of the psychoanalytic theories put forward by his uncle Sigmund Freud, he developed a mastery of public manipulation, suggesting that such manipulation was essential to democracy itself. Bernays strongly believed that people are simply ’stupid’ and in need of being told how to behave, what to believe, what to eat, what to wear and how to vote. The outcomes of such an experiment reverberate to this day.

Some historians credit Bernays’ efforts in the 1920s and 30s for turning the modern citizen into a modern consumer. Not only did he convince Americans that a ‘hearty breakfast’ must include eggs and bacon, as opposed to the traditional toast and coffee, he also managed to persuade women at the time that cigarettes were a symbol of man’s power and domination; to challenge the male sense of superiority, women needed to smoke. A few public stunts later, sales of cigarettes (which Bernays termed ‘torches of freedom’) soared, eventually doubling the market for tobacco manufacturers, who, amongst many other businesses, were Bernays’ clients.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Jason Miller

8/15/07

“The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”

–Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.

Deeply integrated into a cultural and economic system in which compassion is considered to be a weakness and in which greed, exploitation, profits, property, winning, bellicosity and selfishness are sacrosanct, we cannot escape the reality that each of us participates in the American version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to some extent. Unless we isolate ourselves in a mountain cabin or expatriate, as US citizens we are each damned to be one of the 300 million “Little Eichmanns” who enable our cynical plutocratic masters to dominate the world both economically and militarily.

Struggling to make itself heard above the cacophonous din of sound bites, advertising jingles, clichés, tropes, memes, mythos, and various other manifestations of the false consciousness that afflicts so many of us, the voice of conscience occasionally grabs our attention and violently reminds us how badly we are fucking the rest of the world.

And when it does, the question we each need to ask ourselves is, “How much like “Eich” do I want to be?”

While there are myriad ways we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution. Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly all stripes.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By ADAM ENGEL 

8/12/07

Some brave soul might lead us beyond frightened Sentinels, bootsteps deep to real; Judges; land “Lords;” those who would be taken, suckered, ushered to Love’s ideal, pink codicils to freedom, spared bitter betrayal of arbitrary fruit,
as if:

my kingdom,
“my kingdom for”
a hearse,
or Paradise
for obscene visions of
barren buildings,
sealed deposit boxes
centuries to come.

Phantom sandals echo through long, cold, shadow halls. No vocabulary to describe the waste, the idiocy, of paper.

Adam Engel can be reached at

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“If we can’t see a little of George Bush looking back at our reflection, we should look again…”

By Jean-Louis Robert Turcot and Emily Spence

8/11/07

The attempt to stop and possibly reverse Global Warming reminds of the aims of Helen Caldicott with respect to the dangers of a nuclear war. As much her goals were admirable with her tireless effort to inform, and to warn us about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, we have not been able to change one single iota from that possibility.

At the same time, the Beyond War group used the bucket-of-shotgun-pellets method to demonstrate that one single pellet represented all of the firepower of the entire Second World War, while the entire bucket represented the nuclear weapon potential to make war… Again, even though the representation was graphic and dramatic, it did not change anything whatsoever relative to the nuclear menace. Indeed, our nuclear capacity is only becoming more pronounced over time.

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