Watchmen and the Tea Party

There's a certain stillness to be had after an early morning rain. I'm having it now. It's as quiet in here as a silent prayer at the bottom of a grave and even the ubiquitous bird noise beyond my window glass seems subdued. I can see raindrops dripping from bush and bower out there, but that too is a soundless affair. The sky above bird, bush and bower is the color of a chalkboard after the formula for world peace was accidentally erased. It's easy on the eyes, heavy on the heart. The real world, the one outside my head, is either gone or still asleep; hard to tell right now.

Last night after watching the movie "Watchmen," which was a cinematic rendition of the graphic novel of the same name with the only difference between the two being that the novel took a couple of hours to read while the movie went on for...I don't know, what's today's date?, a long time, Woowoo Charly said at its conclusion, "Awesome!" I wanted to second that, but I couldn't because I didn't agree. I thought that a 47 hour movie like this one could have been tighter, but then I understand that the director wanted to be true to the novel, a complex, complicated and intellectual tome. I doubt that the flick could have been a success at the box office with its running time being just short of an average life span in Botswana, but I could be wrong. It has happened once or twice before. Besides its length, the film required one to think, which is an activity foreign to movie-goers who have "Dumb and Dumber" on their Top Five list and they make up a goodly sized portion of the ticket buying public. The concept of thinking to understand came up later that night as well, when I fluffed my pillows and settled down to read a book and await sleep.

"Bananas", subtitled "How the United Fruit Company Shaped The World" is the book I'm currently perusing and enjoying. About half way in I discovered the following passage gleaned from Edward Bernay's book "Propaganda" written in the 1920s. Its concern was the group mind. "The group mind doesn't think," Bernay's wrote, "Instead it has impulses, habits and emotions. The key is for some force to harness them. The force is propaganda or 'the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.' This process of manipulation is an 'unseen mechanism of society' and those that make use of it are an 'invisible government' and the 'true ruling power of our country."

I no longer wonder how the Tea Party got started.