It is an indication that we have nothing on the plebs of Rome — the death of the drug addict and seriously mentally ill and self-mutilating pop music idol Michael Jackson “received more coverage than the Iraq War, 9/11 and the global financial meltdown, last year’s Beijing Olympics, Hurricane Katrina, the death of Pope John Paul II and the Tsunami,” according to the Global Language Monitor.

	Millions of Americans, suffering from “television brain,” are mesmerized by the tawdry and all too predictable end of yet another celebrity.

“In the 72 hours after his death, the Jackson story generated twice as much web news as coalition troops entering Iraq did in the same period,” the Telegraph reports. “It has also become the ninth biggest story in global print media since the start of 2000, according to GLM.”

Bread and Circuses, Patrick Brantlinger writes in his book by the same name, have served as a narcotic for the masses throughout history. In our era the coliseum is electronic and the stupefying, mind-numbing narcotic is efficiently delivered. Television, what the novelist Harlan Ellison called “the glass teat,” distorts reality and shapes the priorities of the spectator public who are little different than Rome’s plebeian masses who partied as Visigoth invaders gathered at the gates.

“The meme ‘bread and circuses’ is almost, as Brantlinger discovers, worn out as a metaphor for television; it has become a truism, as Minow said, that TV is ‘an intellectual wasteland,'” writes Jonathan Wallace of the The Ethical Spectacle. “By contrast to the Roman Emperors, who could only offer their subjects 93 days a year of games, contemporary Americans watch four or five hours of television almost every day of the year. The narcotic effect of television is correspondingly much greater than that of Roman circuses.”

[efoods]Millions of Americans, suffering from what Wallace describes as “television brain,” are mesmerized by the tawdry and all too predictable end of yet another celebrity.

It is of little significance to these hypnotized spectators that the government is conniving to methodically reduce them to destitute paupers and serfs by way of an engineered destruction of the economy. It does not matter that the government has killed well over a million Iraqis and an undetermined number of Afghans and Pakistanis in their names. The death of Michael Jackson is more important than the slow death of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is more important than the plague spawned by genetically modified food and fluoridated water. It ranks higher in importance than the police state control grid falling into place.

All of this corporate spawned celebrity adulation will be the downfall of us yet. One day soon we will discover too late that while we were slumbering before the brainwashing tube a small clan of hereditary psychopaths and their power freak minions have turned the world into a prison planet. It will be too late when they turn to the final chapter of their gruesome plan – a mass culling of the tribe.

Of course, most of us will be none the wiser and rebellion will rarely if ever cross our stupefied minds. Aldous Huxley said we will experience “a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

Michael Jackson — the freakish and sad ghost of a man now idolized by plebs no longer capable of rational thought — is part of the process Huxley talked about when he said revolution will be impossible.

The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today!