(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Which Witch Is Which? How Imagery and Propaganda Mislead Our Minds [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-09 Oh, the miracles of social media, and why I go fishing in that polluted stream! Yes, I am being sarcastic, that’s my up-front disclaimer. You need to know that. You need to be told, this is begins sarcastically, but also, looks with an eye toward relocating sensible and rational thinking. We have endured an onslaught of misinformation and disinformation, including the harvested picture above. Thank you, Eddie Bonuchi, whoever you are, for placing a picture on Facebook with a story about the Salem witch trials, a children’s classroom where misinformation was taught about, and how we can all learn an important lesson about not believing everything you hear, only some of what you see, and asking really important questions that get at the truth and the facts that are reproducible. What does the picture of a female person being burned alive, with no means of escape, have to do with Salem, Massachusetts in 1692? In reality, absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. It is fiction. The Salem witch trials ended in the execution by hanging of 19 persons, and one executed by “pressing,” a means of extracting a death-bed confession through increasingly crushing a person under stones added one at a time. Our capacity for cruelty is not unimaginable. It is innate. When we feel threatened, stressed, put upon, when we cannot cope, when we struggle for everything we need to remain alive, we can be exceptionally cruel, extremely brutal, and more vicious than anyone can fathom. So on the same friend page where this item appeared, I offered a comment. You’ll get to read it and argue with me if you like, but I’d like to explain my perspective first. This last week has been a real roller coaster ride if you have watched the news. For some, this was cathartic, for others, just another episode of the oozing pain and suffering we’re enduring while another political cycle ramps up, and a fellow you all might know, who declared the wheels of justice to be a witch hunt, keeps trying to insert himself into the populist agenda and hold himself out as a “winner.” So, Don, Former Prez, Ultra-Cool Teflon Dude (at least, in his own mind), let me ask you (and everyone else) the rhetorical question I expressed in the title: Which witch is which? How can you tell them apart? How do you know what’s the truth and what isn’t? Where’s reality? Do you really want to burn all these witches (knowing full well that we hung them, not burned them)? Perhaps, Donnie, you know what a witch is, because, you yourself are one? Could that be the case? Perhaps? Do you recognize yourself in these “witches” that you say are being hunted? Hmmmmm…... If you are a fan of the comedy group Monty Python, you might recall a sketch in one of their movies, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, wherein Graham Chapman is portraying King Arthur on his quest, and they come across a village of superstitious commoners who are planning to kill someone accused of being a witch. Terry Jones’ character Sir Bedevere attempts to use odd logic and trickery to unravel the mystery of being a witch. He fails, the hapless victim is set upon by the villagers. Cruelty and ignorance walk merrily hand-in-hand. Oh, the joy they bring to one another, as they skip lightly upon their path of abject stupidity! And we love it! We really like not knowing a damned thing! We roll about like a puppy in tall grass, blissfully unaware, totally free, unfettered, unadorned, overconfident that magic is going to keep up somehow safer and nothing bad will ever happen to us. But I digress. I often do. editing myself is my failing. I’m not good at it. I ramble. How’s that for brutally cruel honesty? Again, the question burns: Which witch is witch? Where does the truth sit in all of this? Do we want truth? I think, like the Col. Jessup character in A Few Good Men uttered, we can’t handle the truth. We don’t want to know. We’d rather be blissfully ignorant, moving through our days unaffected, like our dog rolling in the grass, oblivious to the fleas and ticks, confident that our unbridled joy will never be stopped. That’s the magic of mythology, lore, fables, ancient yearnings for definitive delineation between good and evil, darkness and light, it gives us a place wherein we can behave irresponsibly. There’s so much we do that requires responsibility. This is where we struggle. This is the crux of it all. We got duped by a guy who came along, and like so many other confidence artists and hucksters, we got sold on a bill of goods that were well past expiry, and flawed from the get-go. Does being gullible constitute mental illness? How about being naive? How about longing for something not cruel, not brutal, not filled with decision-making, angst, torment, something that entertains us, something that doesn’t require planning, execution, delivery, fulfillment, customer satisfaction, customer service, all things that require us to pay attention? Does our current world make us mentally ill? Again, I ask — which witch is which? Now, as a segue into my posted comment, this is the real story. We’re going to televise and broadcast the trials of this Donald fellow and his co-defendants. We’re going to give him broad coverage, again, for free. We’re going to put America’s anti-hero up for public viewing, and essentially walk through a logical process, present an immensity of evidence, all in an effort to show that we’re not being cruel and unusual in our accusations. I wrote my comment because I do not want justice. I do not want mercy. I do not want a hanging or a burning or a pressing or any kind or torture. I don’t want Don to pay any price that martyrs him or makes his family name an enduring legacy that America will look back on and say, “That’s what we should have become!” It was a gambler’s fallacy. Now, we’re all bankrupt by this constant ka-ching! sound and bright lights of Don’s portable casino. He did a real number on us. We got fleeced thoroughly. He got us all believing we simply couldn’t lose. He got us believing in witches all over again… Stevie Wonder wrote a song about it, “Superstition,” and whether anyone knows the lyrics they all know the melody. The most important words are these: “When you believe in things That you don't understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain't the way, No, no, no” A blind musician can see more clearly than all of us sighted people. Superstition, cruelty, and ignorance. Those are the common traits in all of us that Don wove together, turned into a thick rope, and lassoed us all. There’s only one way out of all of this. Only one. We have to take ownership of what happened. We have to step away from our cruelty, our vindictiveness, our desire to get even, our desire to walk out of Don’s portable casino flush, because it won’t happen. We got taken. We need to look in the mirror, understand that there’s no “next hand is the winning hand.” Families have been divided. Lovers have stopped loving. Creatives have stopped creating. Cruel, evil, powerful and moneyed persons are sopping up every last dime, farthing, euro, yuan because that’s their addiction. The damage has been done. A trial will not make things right. But we’re going to drag ourselves through all of this, anyway. We’re going to look at ourselves as a nation of people, ordinary folks, a gathering of everyone who either loved or hated this gut and his minions. They all got their hands in our pockets. They all looked at us and decided to go predatory, turn us on one another, perform a typical casino operation, and scarf up all the residuals. They did pretty well. We’re all stuck with the bill for a good time. Don’t get mad. Don’t contemplate getting even. Move on from this disaster. Move on. This is that moment in time when we must all realize we got played by masters of the game. We can put them on trial, it doesn’t matter. We all lost. We all got tricked into believing in witches again. We all fell victim to a much bigger ploy than we could estimate. The only way out of all of this is — Ownership. We all collectively did this. It gets undone by collectively agreeing, for a very short window, that we must make sober choices about doing the dog-roll. We must all listen with our minds when the dog-whistle beckons us to fall back on our old, primal triggers. We need to walk away from folks who ask us to divide and speak through voices of overconfidence, that one side can win and leave the other side decimated. How short is short ? Can you make it five minutes? How about an hour? Can you make it through the day? Let’s build on short efforts, small-scale successes of getting back to one another, getting out of the “us-vs-them” mindset, seeing that no one is a witch, nobody is “magical,” no one is completely without virtue. Not even Don. Not even his minions. Consider that he’s not in jail right now, consider that his acolytes are also walking around without constraint. We’re doing a really good job of following the presumption of “innocent until proven guilty,” and that raises a really important notion. If we’re not pushing to hang him or burn him, and he’s walking around free, Why is he so adamantly defying simple instructions to just shut up, behave, stop his irritating fidgeting, let the process do what it does best (acquit rich white people), and just follow the instruction of learned counsel? Let’s all get better about ignoring this streetcorner preacher named Don. He’s not a well man. Move on. He has no story to tell, at least, not one that’s original. That’s most important, as we attempt to keep rebuilding our ties to one another. Here’s my Facebook comment, in its entirety: “I am not defending Don the Con. He is a con man. This is well established. He is, however, also, mentally unwell, and has been so for a long, long time. His mental illness is not anything simple, and like so many other folks who struggle, he is using denial and avoidance to not look at himself, not see who he is, not distill himself down to anything human. He keeps doing what gamblers do, he keeps doubling down, getting others involved in his mental denial, developing his disordered conditions into a saleable commodity, trading on his unwellness, manipulating the innate empathy of hundreds of thousands of people, evoking the potential bitterness in normal, ordinary, welcoming, beautiful people. He turns others into stressed out, weakened, ghostly shells of their former selves, because of his illness. Portrayed is a woman being burned alive, inhumanely tortured, treated cruelly because of her potential as a person who studied herbs, animals, nature, the workings of stars and planets, and all of this in a way that she simply couldn't explain to folks who were struggling to remain alive and find enough food, water, basic goods and implements for sustaining themselves. If you live in a concrete jungle, or if you live in an electrified community, if you walk into a convenient store, let alone a full-service grocer, and complain about no item that you want to buy, no price that you want to pay, too many carbs, too much unhealthy stuff, just generally, having nothing but gripes about life, you've missed the point. When you have little or no food, just the dirty clothes you are wearing, stale indoor living conditions, water is questionable, and boiling it is a true luxury, and you must rely on only a fire brand or a candle for light at night, then you have a right to complain. You will also be mentally stressed and most likely unwell, and your imagination will run wild when someone accuses you of being this or that. What I am driving at is that Don the Con doesn't deserve anything like being burned, electrocuted, put to death by lethal injection, hanging, beheading, flogging, stoning, disemboweling, or any other demonstratively inhumane form of execution. No. None of that. He deserves to be isolated from his cult. We deserve - no, we DEMAND - that unaffected folk, those who aren't adherents to his nonsense, and those who are beginning to recover from the toxicity, and those who are beginning to see both sides again, and beginning to come out from under the fog of this uncivil war, be afforded insulation from his shock jock absurdity and constant flow of crapola. Many of us have been wounded by his onslaught and illness. Many have been made ill. Many need medication, treatment, recovery options. He, perhaps, could receive these things too, but that really depends on this last step happening - - He must be placed. This is a euphemism for being permanently institutionalized. We can be creative. We can provide many possible ways to do this. We don't have to think of assignment to a lock-down facility, or a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest kind of existence, prison would not be a suitable confinement, for a myriad of reasons. This is a sickly fellow who pursued reanimation of as many of our darker moments in the human story as he could possibly conjure up. That kind of sickness requires an assignment that does no harm, offers lifetime assurance, keeps him away from us, and moreover, insulates us from his dangerous ploys. No more retreating to broken, time-tested-to-fail ways of deterrence. No need to burn him at the stake. That way, we can all get on with our lives, get away from the trauma of it all, continue the difficult work of rebuilding community, and offer our world a chance to recover. But, I'm just one voice. We'll likely forget our humanity, and go for the more cruel and unusual approach, because the short-term woody we get from it far outweighs the slow, warm feeling that comes from doing the right thing. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/9/2192370/-Which-Witch-Is-Which-How-Imagery-and-Propaganda-Mislead-Our-Minds Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/