in checking out the dusty, virtual shelves of my old pc this, another poem heretofore not published, that I initially wrote perhaps close to 40 years ago — so well before the current age of ‘small screens’ and handheld devices that have, in some ways, displaced the traditional tool of mass-influence the ‘tv’!
yet television still plays a preeminent role, for many people, in purveying official ‘mis’ and ‘dis’ information, via so-called news ‘programmes’ that really only have the purpose of delivering and instilling the preferred narrative of the ‘rulers’ (essentially that group of wealthy corpocrats who sponsor/lobby/influence/place managers in positions of direct policy formulation and control within the governments of the world’s most powerful nations)…
in recent years this has become ever more apparent, as evidenced throughout the initial years of the ‘covid-era’ and continuing after the blatant and often erroneous pandemic ‘fear-mongering’ into the latest period of intimidation and priming the ‘masses’ in respect of multiple existential threats in the forms of: world war III, global warming, the advent of AI, of course, the ‘next’ pandemic…
the cultivation and influencing of groupthink is essential for those who want to keep things going their way… so whilst this poem is no doubt, in some respects, ‘dated’ it still conveys a message that has relevance in today’s world of social- and mass-(legacy) media, and in this very moment… the outcome of the election of the next US president coming to its finale within just a few days of the publishing of this post!
Smells Like Groupthink
Oh, Groupthink stinks
It is the rancid sweat
Of the media manipulated
Moribund and mindless masses
For those who would
Place themselves above
The rest of us for power
And money, never love
Create this mental inertia
They spend their time
Steadily shaping the
Controlling paradigm
Image, message, soundbite
Electronic iconography
Tirelessly assaulting us
With their ‘fear pornography’
Which makes decision making
No less than a travesty
For how can we be free to choose
When minds aren’t truly free
By daily doses, reinforcement
Douses, like acid rain
Sparks of individuality that
Might light the human brain
Boxed in their putrid pens
The fearful human sheep
Harvest only from their dreams
What their masters let them reap
The pitiful potato-people sit
Couched in incessant alpha waves
And vegetate their way
To becoming mental slaves
Mesmerized the myopic masses
Both moribund and meek
Never will live to inherit
The perfect world they seek
While those who would
Dictate what all may think
Laugh fatly up their golden sleeves
Inured from Groupthink’s stink
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