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TranceTara -> RE: How come Hannity doesn't get fired? (2/4/2009 12:41:41 PM)
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quote:
Back to the OP, He doesn't get fired because he brings ratings...which brings in advertising dollars...same for Limbaugh or Anderson Cooper.
So true. If there weren't a market for it he wouldn't have a job. There are people who agree with him and will continue to watch.
I was going over some notes I took from a great book called, A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman. He's a Jungian and had some very interesting perspectives. I hope you all don't mind me quoting a few.
p.17 “During the five thousand six hundred years of written history, fourteen thousand six hundred wars have been recorded. Two or three wars each year of human history.”
p. 21 “To declare war ‘normal’ does not eliminate the pathologies of behavior, the enormities of devastation, the unbearable pain suffered in bodies and souls. Nor does the idea that war is normal justify it. Brutalities such as slavery, cruel punishment, abuse of young children, corporal mutilation remain reprehensible, yet find acceptance in the body politic and may even be incorporated into its laws. Though ‘war is normal’ shocks our morality and wounds our idealism, it stands solidly as a statement of fact.
‘War’ is becoming more normalized every day. Trade war, gender war, Net war, information war. But war against cancer, war against crime, against drugs, poverty, and other ills of society have nothing to do with the actualities of war. These civil wars, wars within civilian society, mobilize resources in the name of a heroic victory over an insidious enemy. These wars are noble, good guys against bad and no one gets hurt. This way of normalizing war has white-washed the word and brainwashed us, so that we forget its terrible images. Then, whenever the possibility of actual war approaches with its reality of violent death-dealing combat, the idea of war has been normalized into nothing more than putting more cops on the street, more rats in the lab, and tax rebates for urban renewal.
I base the statement ‘war is normal’ on two factors we have already seen:
its constancy throughout history and its ubiquity over the globe. These two factors require another more basic: acceptability.”
p. 23 “Ingrained or acquired? Individual person’s aggressive instinct or social group’s aggrandizing claims? The various contesting assertions about the origins of war can be reduced to two basic positions. On the one side, theories of psychoanalysis that take human nature back to early loss of love objects and to the birth trauma; theories of animal biology (inborn release mechanisms of fight-or-flight; theories of determining genes pushing to get what they want). On the other side, war is a product of the internal structure of groups, their belief systems, their territorial claims, their exogamous fertility requirements, and the collective psyche of the crowd as such.
In both cases, whether human drive or societal necessity, war requires an imagined enemy. ‘Warre,’ writes Hobbes, is that condition ‘where every man is Enemy to every other man,’ and Clausewitz insists that ‘the enemy must always be kept in mind.’ ‘
P.25 “Mind you now: there may not actually be an enemy! All along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy, a phantom enemy. It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but the imagination. Imagination is the driving force, especially when imagination has been preconditioned by the media, education, and religion, and fed with aggressive boosterism and pathetic pieties by the state’s need for enemies. The imagined phantom swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity. The archetypal idea gains a face. Once the enemy has been named, war has already been declared and the actual declaration becomes inconsequential, only legalistic. The invasion of Iraq began before the invasion of Iraq; it had already begun when that nation was named among the axis of evil.
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The road to peace begins within each and every one of us. Yes, we can discuss ways of improving the world and coming up with plans. Vision. But until we have peace within, until we have made peace with those warring factions within our own minds, then how can there be peace outside? The world is a mere projection of what is going on inside our heads.
And, until such a time, we will have those extremists spouting their venom and hordes of people lining up to watch and listen, and sending in their donations for they are having their fears, their negative thoughts all reinforced. Therefore, "I must be right. I think, therefore I am."
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