"Right now it feels like a wonderful victory: I made it 500 miles! and its thanks to all you and to my family and to all the wonderful people and to Doug, who's walked nearly every inch of it with me. I've never been prouder to be a Utahan, it's a wonderful thing, thanks," as Housman's Effect chokes his voice.Sgt. Thompson has committed suttee, he has become something to Behold. We can hear his ordinary voice, and then it changes. Our physiology produces our psychology, we say; what does our psychology produce? merely the natural and proper machinery for asserting the Will of the "Fittest," neatly conflating "best fit" with "most powerful," as in utterly discredited Social Darwinism?
In the sound of his voice quavering, we are hearing his psyche being elevated to the mythic realm, right there in public. That's the effect of the poetic impact.
Like Gilgamesh, Sgt. Thompson dove headlong into NO 1's Land, seeking the boon of the Life-Giving Power. Like running your finger along the nape of a lover's neck produces inordinate shivers--et cetera--Sgt. Thompson's walk through the land he loves with all his heart was indeed a feat of mythic proportions. And he's got poll numbers to confirm it. I must confess, I can't remember how to do the correlational analysis I learned from Prof. Thorndike up at Western Washington University. The energy stirred up from his heroic journey surely contributed to the melting of the Fear, in Utah, that freezes us all in place.
I must say, the isolation of Utahans from the rest of the Nation is evident in his surprise at being hassled by the Man for stepping out of line. Some of us, like the Selma Marchers, for instance, or the Orangeburg Three, can do more than imagine. In the 18th and 19th centuries, in the Indian Wars, we acquired this great land through what we now call "ethnic cleansing" when it's done by those out of our favor.
Genocide is accomplished by Goerring's Law of National Myth-Jacking. And we've had 75 word-warriors hard at war for years now, weaponizing mythosociopsychical symbols, declaring the Commons to be Occupied Territory, declaring war on the people whom they claim so fondly to love.
That's the only thing that disappointed me about the Pentagon Propaganda segment: NO 1 called it Goerring's Method. These aren't just psy ops! Using the rhetoric of "media failure" or "military failure," as I think Greg Palast would remind us, falls prey to the deception: how many freaking failures in a freaking row does it take, to turn "failures" into "policy?"
All the people involved share a common belief in life as Holy War, Life as Great Cosmic Machine, Controlled by Math but Answerable to NO 1, the perfect Mythical Hitman for National Myth-Jacking!
Our conception of the cosmos as a machine is at the heart of our problem. We conceive of society to be one vast Holy War Machine. We talk about our military as if they were ordinary contractors doing ordinary business, who then go out and murder on industrial scales.
Replicating what the rest of the apes do, only on a vastly larger scale, isn't "civilization." It's just Jungle Jurisprudence. The military isn't some kind of contractor we hire for adding a wing to our home. Aaron Brown completely failed to see his own assumption: like the weather, war is beyond questioning. So we're supposed to just listen to the Warmen, like you listen to the weathermen and the sportsmen. War is simply what we do, a fundamental fact of life, not something to be debated, not even in the self-styled leader of the free world.
COL. SAM GARDINER: I think that there are about four or five levels of problems here. The most profound and the most painful is their (sic) disdain of the Pentagon for democracy. I mean, think about it. What we have seen, this is a part of the campaign. They don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe that the American people, if given the truth, will come to a good decision. That’s very painful.
The second thing is about the military analysts themselves. They were being given these briefings, but none of them ever said that they were provided this inside information.
And then, I think the third thing is the networks themselves. They wanted cheerleaders, and they could have—without knowing the background that the analysts were being given inside information, they wanted cheerleaders, and they knew that cheerleaders gave them access. So, I mean, there are really some serious problems from top to bottom on this.
Now that I've revisited this quote, I see how Col. Gardiner exposes the duplicity of the networks: whose word do we have that they didn't know? The word of people who knew that "cheerleaders gave them access." What's the value of access, after all, if it isn't inside information? They had to know.
These militaristic madmen, in uniform and in mufti, have given us the Goerring Treatment.
The degradations endured by Everywoman, Lisa Smiths everywhere, are the icons for the role of women in the cosmology of this phallocentric cult of holy warriors: absolute subjugation. Sociobiologists call it "male certainty of paternity." WeeMen call it "barefoot and pregnant."
WeeMen aren't husbanding Mother Earth; they aren't even pimping Her; no, WeeMen are machining Lady Liberty like she was a god-forsaken, desecrated, coin-operated drug store orgasmatron.
WeeMen, as opposed to real men, have declared the entire cosmos, and especially the Fountain of Life itself, Gaia's Own Vagina, as Occupied Territory.
Housman's Effect, I say, is evidence of transcendence, just as vocal chords are transcended by the meaning, not just the sound, of these words.
Poetic impact, then, is the "computer programming" equivalent of clicking on the icons of the Control Panel of Our Shared Being Aware of Our Own Becoming.
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