The popularity of movies like "2012" and "Collapse" makes one wonder what happened to the old movies, where the Lone Ranger or another hero came in at the last moment to save the day.When I met Ruppert at U.C.L.A., who is the person of focus in the movie Collapse, it looked to me like he smokes about as much as Bob Dylan does.
As we chatted back and forth, I gathered that this man is as serious as a heart attack, but even more controversial.
I wrote about the movie Collapse a while back on a post here, but I assure you I never expected Roger Ebert to say:
If this man is correct, then you may be reading the most important story in today's paper.(Ebert Review). The movie is getting good reviews in many quarters where one would not expect it.
I have no way of assuring you that the bleak version of the future outlined by Michael Ruppert in Chris Smith's "Collapse" is accurate. I can only tell you I have a pretty good built-in B.S. detector, and its needle never bounced off zero while I watched this film. There is controversy over Ruppert, and he has many critics. But one simple fact at the center of his argument is obviously true, and it terrifies me.
That fact: We have passed the peak of global oil resources.
The movie is outraging the far right who call anyone a conspiracy theorist who realizes:
a) that oil is a finite liquid,The last and largest bubble that is going to pop is not the bank bubble, the housing bubble, the Wall Street bubble, it is the great propaganda bubble.
b) that the world's military machines are addicted to it,
c) that civilization is addicted to & founded upon it, and
d) that oil is going to run out.
Anything that offers to pop that greatest of all American bubbles is hated and called a conspiracy theory by those blowing hot air furiously into the bubble.
The blowhards who say global warming is a hoax, who power the great Lawrence Welk propaganda bubble machine, while preparing for the oil wars, are the ones I am talking about.
One thing I can't figure out, however, is why Ruppert sings in a band called "New White Trash" ... stay tuned.
Propoganda bubbles are rather easy to explain IMO, in that Americans have been conditioned over the years by media saturation to view popular media as an alternative - usually "feel good" - reality, where stories are told about reality, but where no actual reality ever comes through. How else to explain the obscene levels of on-screen violence that is routinely shrugged off by both young and old alike?
ReplyDeleteFurther, what's funny to me about the chattering class media and government officials' conspiracy accuasations, is that they are for the most part the only one's reacting at all, as the general public usually merely shrugs off anything controversial as just so much more entertainment, and moves on to the next big thing.
I think Orwell had most of this down pat.