Why I'm Happy

In one of my posts in The Show Must Continue, I offered a link to an Aldous Huxley interview rather than a link to one of my songs on YouTube. In it Huxley voices his protest of how the psychological manipulations of the mass media undermine democracy by forcing behaviors upon the population rather than letting them make a conscious rational choice. Clearly nothing has changed since this interview aired in 1960 and I would offer my own experience as clear evidence to support this statement. My mother didn't want me to be an artist but she thought that a nice safe job in a creative field like advertising would suit me. That's how I ended up studying techniques of advertising in college in 1984-85 and learning the most effective techniques of what they call 'the art of persuasion'. Naturally a job in advertising appeals to anyone who craves power, but I knew I was in the wrong class when we started learning about Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov was the famous researcher who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by ringing the bell every time the dogs ate. Such mental associations are equally effective on humans and I simply had no interest in controlling the public in this somewhat unfair way. With my knowledge of this promotional technique and what I can gather of how my songs and blogs must have first impacted the public in 2007, a time which eerily resembles the present in terms of how ordinary and invisible I appear to those in my immediate sphere, even as my posts dominate the internet, I can form an educated hypothesis of how my erased posts were treated by the business. We must recall the conditions of that time: an unpopular president and a controversial war. I think that a lot of protesters turned to my online accounts as a kind of sanctuary. In my music they found what was missing from the songs offered by the radio and they agreed with much of what I had to say as it was illustrated by my dialogues. They trusted my music and writing implicitly. In late 2007, from confusion brought on by a rogue television program that its dishonest employer still insists on broadcasting, I erased my posts. But before the business could capitalize on this apparent windfall, they needed to create a new mental association for my music and writing in the minds of its adherents. The trust that people had in my work because it opposed what they considered to be an unjust war was twisted into trust of the establishment and of the corporate media. In my dialogues, for instance, instead of me bashing them, they made it looked like they bashed themselves out of magnanimity. And my Bird of Prey, a song which was intended to show the dark destructive side of the subconscious mind, was [am I right?] sold to MacDonnell-Douglas, the warplane manufacturer. Bits of my insightful statements ended up in the mouths of the media as the content of their phony banters which fill the space between their reports. In other words, they used my work to make you think they were me and that they could be implicitly trusted. No one can tell me that the band that stole the lion's share of my songs was not loved. I received the flip side of that love for the better part of three years. And because this band was so loved and trusted, these monsters were able to lead the crowd into the most unfortunate trend that may have ever been spun from media dishonesty: cruelty became hip. Hate parties are so tasteless that even when a convicted serial killer goes to prison, no one turns it into a party, but hate parties were cool when this band had the support of the business. Those girls who picked on that poor old lady on the bus might well have been fans of one or more of the frauds who illegally built their success out of my talent. And picking on an old lady like that is not much different from Bush's and Cheney's picking on a third world country like Iraq. Yes, it all makes sense to me now. If I'm ever standing in front of a crowd of fans, I hope that each one of them will have made a free and conscious choice to support me. The artificial love of a manipulated crowd would only leave me feeling like a failure.
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