by KaiserJeep » Tue 05 Jan 2016, 06:27:22
MQ, you seem to want to believe with 20/20 hindsight that it was completely obvious what was going on from the beginning. It definitely was not - there were many media outlets that did no live 9/11 coverage at all - and did no offline reporting until after the first tower collapse. An airliner hitting a skyscraper would be something you see on the evening news - until the second plane, or the third. All the cameras pointed at the smoking tower and providing live coverage captured subsequent impacts - and obviously, this was then no accident - and it was hours after the initial reports before most caught on - including me who watched the whole thing live in my living room.
Again, there is no reason to assume conspiracy when simple incompetence will serve. Television reporters are selected for appearance, not intelligence.
The POTUS is surrounded by people who serve the same purpose as the Laputian Flapper in Gulliver's Travels.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')
The Laputians
The Laputians are a race of weirdos whose heads are always leaning to the right or left and whose eyes never focus on the world around them. They live on a floating island controlled by a central magnet. The fact that they float through the air without direct ties to the Earth is pretty symbolic. These guys love two things: math and music. In both of these, they are very far advanced, but you know what they stink at? Anything practical. They can't build houses with right angles, and they can't sew clothes that fit. The reason all of their designs fall apart is because they refuse to take measurements from real life, preferring instead to use equations to prove what has to be true.
Still, despite the fact that Laputa floats, it does have political connections to the continent below it, Balnibarbi. All of the Laputian King's ministers have their estates on the continent, so the King can't just enslave the people living under their island. But the King does maintain a strict tribute policy. If the people below Laputa do not send their tributes, well, there will be hell to pay. The King will float his island right over their heads, blocking the sun and rain and dropping stones on them until they pay up. So you can see, even though the only thing these people really know is music and math, they still like to dabble in world domination – just human nature coming through, yet again.
The Flapper
Laputians are so distracted with their internal world of Deep Thoughts that they need to be reminded of what they are doing at any given time. That's why all the Laputian nobility must be accompanied by a servant at all times. These servants carry a kind of rattle at the end of a long stick that they use to touch the mouth of a Laputian who is supposed to be speaking, the ear of a Laputian who is supposed to be listening, and the eye of a Laputian who is supposed to be looking at something.
The Laputian Ladies
Because Laputian men spend so much time wrapped up in their own heads, they don't have much time for their bodies, if you know what we mean, and we imagine that you do. They're not big in the love department. So when men from the continent come to visit Laputa on business, Laputian women are totally willing to have affairs left, right, and center – they love strangers. And their husbands never notice, after all. They're too busy with their math and music to notice their wives stepping out on them. This is one possible explanation for the origin of the name "Laputa," from the Italian la puta, "whore." (For more on Swift and women, check out our theme on "Gender.")
The Lagado Royal Academy
The Lagado Royal Academy is a lampoon of the Royal Academy in London in Swift's day (Lagado being the main city of Balnibarbi). The experiments Gulliver records – men trying to turn poo back into food, extract sunbeams from cucumbers and so on – were real things that eighteenth century scientists tried to do (source: Robert Greenberg, Editor, Gulliver's Travels. New York: Norton, 1961, 133). It sounds like there were some pretty ripe candidates for the Ig Nobel awards hanging around back then.
The Laputian flapper is a servant who carries around a flapper - a dried pig's bladder on a stick - and whose job it is to "flap" his master's ear or eye when
in the opinion of the flapper - there is something being said that his master needs to hear, or something that his master needs to see.
It may have been published in 1725, but today's pols have the same failings as did those in early 18th Century London. The more prominent pols are surrounded by circles of flappers - the modern names being staff members, cabinet ministers, personal secretaries, administrative assistants, and the like. These flappers of the great man in turn surround themselves with additional flappers, in order to reinforce their own sense of importance. Somebody like the POTUS has so many flappers that a minimum wage employee - or perhaps an unpaid intern - makes the first cut of what the POTUS needs to know about. Swift was actually fearful of being charged with treason for publishing his satire of "modern" politics, and toned down his original draft before publication. Instead he identified a major weakness of politics - higher ranking pols are increasingly disconnected from reality by circles of flappers.
Clinton I, Bush II, and Obama are all ripe for satire if you ask me. But inspired literary lunacy such as
Gulliver's Travels is no longer being written, another casualty of the Internet. Nobody much bothers to read thoughtful and insightful analysis of past events today, much less biting satire - instead they retain the incomplete first impressions and the erroneous assumptions made by the stupid-but-pretty in front of a video camera. Accuracy in reporting is one of the prices we pay for a live network.
Although they are dying, monthly glossy news magazines in print provide far more accuracy and a degree of analysis and a thoughtful perspective that one will never get from the Internet. Most people would be better informed by ignoring TV and the Internet and simply reading the news - but reading is not a passive activity, it requires effort and thought.
http://www.shmoop.com/gullivers-travels/
